by Danny Stephens | Oct 13, 2026 | Fire Suppression Education
A sawmill makes its own fuel. Every cut throws off sawdust and fines, and every shift the stuff settles on beams, belts, and motors and collects under the machinery where nobody can see it. Add hot equipment and hydraulic oil in a cramped building and you get what...
by Danny Stephens | Oct 5, 2026 | Fire Suppression Education
The best fire agent on your truck is the one that’s ready the moment the tones drop — and still ready the next time, with no drill of draining and flushing the tank in between. For a long time the agents departments lived with made that a trade: keep it loaded...
by Danny Stephens | Sep 30, 2026 | Fire Suppression Education
There is no worse place to have a fire than at sea. On land, a burning building has a fire department rolling toward it and a street full of hydrants. A ship in open water has neither. The crew fights with what is aboard, they cannot walk away from the problem, and if...
by Danny Stephens | Sep 22, 2026 | Fire Suppression Education
The machines that hold the power grid together are getting old, and they are starting to burn. Transformer installations in the United States peaked in the mid-1970s, the average unit lasts about forty years, and much of that fleet is reaching the end of the run all...
by Danny Stephens | Sep 15, 2026 | Fire Suppression Education
An electric vehicle doesn’t wait until it’s moving to become a fire problem. Most of the time it’s sitting still — parked on level three, or plugged into a charger — when a cell lets go. That’s the part that makes a parking structure such a...
by Danny Stephens | Sep 8, 2026 | Fire Suppression Education
There’s a good chance a battery farm has gone up somewhere in your first-due in the last couple of years, or is about to. The fenced rows of containers behind a substation, the cluster of cabinets next to a solar field — that’s a Battery Energy Storage...
by Danny Stephens | Sep 1, 2026 | Fire Suppression Education
For thirteen weeks we’ve talked about the fireground — the engine, the tender, the crew on the line. Section 5 turns to a different problem: the hazards that live inside a building’s own equipment, where the fire starts in the machinery you’re trying...
by Danny Stephens | Aug 25, 2026 | Fire Suppression Education
Every firefighter learns it early: you don’t put a straight stream on a burning liquid. Hit a pan of flaming grease or a fuel spill with plain water and you don’t put it out — you spread it. The water sinks, the burning fuel rides on top, and now the fire...
by Danny Stephens | Aug 17, 2026 | Fire Suppression Education
Every structure fire comes down to a race between the water you can put on it and the heat the fire is throwing back. In a district where the nearest hydrant is a memory and the water on scene is whatever rode in on the tender, that race is the whole ballgame. Water...
by Danny Stephens | Aug 10, 2026 | Fire Suppression Education, News
For fifty years the fire service reached for AFFF because it worked. Aqueous film-forming foam knocked down flammable-liquid fires fast, and for most of that time nobody asked what it left behind. Now we know — and the ground is shifting under the entire category. The...
by Danny Stephens | Aug 4, 2026 | Fire Suppression Education
Last week’s data showed F-500 EA stopping lithium-ion fires cold — deeper cooling, halted propagation, dramatically lower toxic gas. This week we look at where those fires increasingly happen: inside the parking structures beneath our offices, apartments,...
by Danny Stephens | Jul 25, 2026 | Fire Suppression Education
Last week we walked through thermal runaway — the self-feeding chain reaction that makes a lithium-ion fire so hard to stop. Knowing why these fires behave the way they do is one thing. Knowing what actually shuts them down is another. This week we set the talk aside...
