Reply #35: Steel, fire, and Pyrocool [View All]

[DulceDecorum]

Almost 12 weeks after the terrorist atrocity at New York's World Trade Center, there is at least one fire still burning in the rubble - it is the longest-burning structural fire in history.
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Tinsley says there are several reasons for the longevity of the fire: "First, this is not a typical fire by any means. The combustible debris is mixed with twisted steel in a mass that covers 17 acres, and may be 50 metres deep. This is the one all future fire scenes will be measured against."
http://journals.iranscience.net:800/www.newscientist.com/www.newscientist.com/hottopics/usterror/usterror.jsp@id=ns99991634

On the morning of September 30, two thousand gallons of PYROCOOL FEF was delivered to the Liberty Sector Command Post at Liberty and West Streets, adjacent to the West side of what was the North Tower. Staging operations were coordinated by WTC Incident Command and FDNY Research and Development (R&D) that would apply PYROCOOL to two areas of immediate concern - the debris field on the West side of the North Tower and the backside of the debris field of the Federal Building (No. Seven). For the Building Seven operation, a 75-foot ladder tower (Truck Company 133-Brooklyn) was utilized, together with a 500 GPM Akron eductor. Foam was applied, at approximately 500 GPM, for two hours to the middle section of Building Seven, after which a portable infrared camera revealed that the area had been fully extinguished. In fact, no hot spots were found in the area where PYROCOOL had been applied.
http://www.pyrocool.org/news.htm

Both PYROCOOL A® and PYROCOOL® FEF are of such structure that each will absorb a photon, elevate to an excited state, and revert to the ground state within a period of 10-3 to 10-6 seconds. Additionally, PYROCOOL® FEF will provide a foam blanket or aqueous barrier that will suppress the flood of volatile organic vapors into the air, thus eliminating flashback of the fire into areas that have already been extinguished by the primary mechanism."
http://www.pyrocool.org/how_it_works.htm

The longest-burning fire on earth, in southeastern Australia, is thought to have been started by a lightning strike 2,000 years ago and is slowly eating away at a buried coal deposit. In Centralia, Pa., a fire that began in a landfill in 1962 spread to old coal mines and has been burning ever since.
"When you have a huge mass of materials deeply buried like this, it's sort of analogous to the Centralia mine fire," said Dr. Thomas J. Ohlemiller, a chemical engineer and fire expert at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md. "Very little heat is lost, so the reaction can keep going at relatively low temperatures, provided you have a weak supply of oxygen coming through the debris."
In September, several government and private experts offered various proposals to help curb the fire, including the use of foams commonly employed to fight underground fires in oil fields and of hand-held heat- sensing instruments to track hot spots. BUT THE CITY TURNED DOWN ALMOST ALL OF THE SUGGESTIONS.
"IT'S FRUSTRATING TO FIND YOURSELF SITTING ON THE SIDELINES WHEN YOU KOW WHAT TO DO," said a federal official.
City fire officials defended their approach, saying they rejected several proposals after deeming them either too dangerous or possibly ineffective.
One idea that was accepted came from a company in Lynchburg, Va., that sold the city about 3,000 gallons of its product Pyrocool, which, when mixed with water, is intended to absorb heat from a fire until the temperature drops below the point of combustion. A total of 750,000 gallons of the diluted Pyrocool was spread over ground zero in late September and early October, at a cost of about $120,000.
Pyrocool's operations director, Eddie Tyler, said the substance had been used to quickly douse thousands of fires worldwide over the past eight years.
When round-the-clock Pyrocool treatment at the trade center WAS STOPPED AFTER A WEEK, Chief Blaich said, there was noticeable progress. But the fires were still burning, in large part because of difficulty in getting the substance down through the debris pile and directly onto hot spots.
In a hot flaming fire, many toxic chemicals are incinerated, with little given off except carbon soot, carbon dioxide, water vapor and other fairly innocuous emissions.
But the RELATIVELY LOW TEMPERATURES OF THE TRADE CENTER FIRES mean that traces of dozens of toxic chemicals and heavy metals are carried into the air, including benzene, a cancer-causing compound released when fuels are burned, and styrene, a gas emitted by burning plastic. At times the chemicals in the air at the site reach dangerous levels, particularly when fire flares up, as it did on Nov. 8.
http://www.wardgriffin.com/fire.htm