The importance of knowing the common causes of fire in industrial units to avoid them

Actualizado a fecha: 2 December, 2018

An Industrial fire is a type of industrial disaster involving a conflagration which occurs in an industrial setting. Unfortunately, there have been many of them during the 2016 in  Spain (Alhambra factory, Ybarra factory, etc). That is why we want to remind you how important is the passive fire protection in industrial units by listing the most common causes of industrial fires and how easy would be to stop them with a correct security system.

– Industrial fires often, but not always, occur together with explosions. They are most likely to occur in facilities where there is a lot of flammable material present. Such material can include petroleum, petroleum products such as petrochemicals, or natural gas.

– Processing flammable materials such as hydrocarbons in units at high temperature and/or high pressure makes the hazards more severe.

– Facilities with suchcombustible material include oil refineries, tank farms (oil depots), natural gas processing plants, and chemical plants, particularly petrochemical plants. Such facilities often have their own fire departments for firefighting. Sometimes large amounts of dust or powder are vulnerable to combustion and their ignition can cause dust explosions. Severe industrial fires have involved multiple injuries, loss of life, costly financial loss, and/or damage to the surrounding community or environment.

– Process Hazard Analysis (PHA) is a set of organized and systematic assessments of the potential hazards for an industrial process used to analyze potential causes and consequences of fires, explosions, releases of toxic or flammable chemicals, and major spills of hazardous chemicals.

Source: Wikipedia