The Waste Industry Safety and Health (WISH) Forum agrees with ‘90%’ of the Environment Agency’s Fire Prevention Plan (FPP) guidance – the Forum’s chair, Chris Jones has said.
However, speaking at the Fire Prevention and Control conference in London yesterday (9 November) Mr Jones added that the Environment Agency had yet to “converge” the guidance with the latest scientific findings on combustion of waste.
One of WISH’s initial fire tests on baled material, which took place in 2014 at the Fire Protection Association in Gloucestershire (photo: WRA)
In the second session of the conference, organised by letsrecycle.com, and chaired by Wood Recyclers Association executive director Julia Turner, Mr Jones updated delegates on recent fire tests conducted by the WISH forum.
He was joined on the panel by Angus Sangster, fire safety engineer manager for International Fire Consultants and the Chief Fire Officers’ Association – which has been working in conjunction with WISH to conduct the experiments.
The tests – which involved burning different waste materials to determine their combustible properties – will inform the second version of WISH’s own fire guidance, due to be published in March 2017.
‘Naïve’
Mr Jones suggested that when WISH’s first draft guidance was published in October 2014, it had “naively” presumed how waste fires would behave when lit.
But the forum found that no real scientific research had been undertaken on the combustible properties of material “since the effect of fires on caravan sites in the 1950s”.
The recent tests, he reported, show that waste is “much more resistant to ignition than anyone thought” and that bales of material “do not burn the same” as piles. Mr Jones added that fires which grow in waste “from the inside out” can burn at temperatures of 1,200 degrees Celsius and are ”much more problematic” than fires which burn on the surface of a pile.
FPP
Commenting on the Environment Agency’s recently-published FPP guidance (see letsrecycle.com story), Mr Jones said that WISH agreed with 90% of its measures, but added that its own plan would concentrate on extinguishing fires “as fast as is practicable” without “turning waste operatives into firefighters”.
The FPP guidance is an update on previous rules stipulating various restrictions on the storage and separation distances between piles of waste materials.
Unlike the Agency’s guidance, WISH’s own guidance will argue that letting some waste fires burn themselves out “can be a better option” but should not be considered “without serious thought”.
Chris Jones, chair of WISH forum, is open to working closer with the Environment Agency
The plan will also propose a five-metre high, 10-metre long stack size for waste – described by Mr Jones as a “long sausage” which could be broken up before the fire has time to spread. The FPP guidance sets the height limit at four metres high.
WISH will also propose interlacing waste bales in order to reduce gaps between the stacks. In the event of a fire, these gaps become ‘vortexes’, sucking up air currents which add oxygen to the fire.
‘Battle’
Mr Jones said: “It probably feels like it has been a constant battle with the Environment Agency and WISH over the last three or four years. What we now need to do is take that planning and hard work and put it into practice and take our Environment Agency clients along with us on that.
“I in the meantime welcome anything that can be done to converge the Fire Prevention Plan and WISH’s guidance but at the moment we do come from two different viewpoints. We are not going to be apologists for mega stacks, but on the other hand there has not been a day in the last 12 years where there hasn’t been a waste site on fire in the UK.”
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Source: letsrecycle.com Waste Managment
