Are you prepared for landfill fires? These fires burn beneath the surface, so you need an agent designed to penetrate. Enough oxygen is available beneath the surface to sustain combustion, so laying foam on the surface won’t smother these fires.
F-500 Encapsulator Agent will penetrate deep and provide the burn back resistance needed to extinguish landfill fires. At the same time, F-500 EA cools the fuel. If you remove the heat; you remove the fire! Finally, F-500 EA is versatile. One agent can handle the varied things you would find in a landfill; Class A (paper, plastics, fabrics), Class B (oil in tires) or even Class D metals.
- Manufactured in compliance with HCT’s ISO 9001 Quality System – Accredited by FM Global.
- Non-toxic and Non-skin Sensitizing
- Nonhazardous – Contains no ingredients reportable under Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act (SARA) or Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA).
- 100% fully Biodegradable
EPA NCP Product Schedule List
F-500 Encapsulator Agent is well suited for near-surface and deep-seated fires that occur in landfills due to its versatility. No other single fire suppression agent is capable of handling Class A, B (polar and nonpolar) and D fires.
F-500 EA extinguishes a fire in three ways. It cools the fuel and surrounding surfaces, encapsulates the fuel and interrupts the free radical chain reaction. Any one of those elements can extinguish a fire. The F-500 EA molecules change the way water cools a fire from steam conversion to thermal conveyance. The F-500 EA solution will be capable of reducing the temperature 10-20 times greater than plain water alone.
F-500 EA reduces the surface tension of the water, allowing the solution to penetrate into the pores of Class A materials. Reducing the surface tension also allows the solution to penetrate deep, below the surface of the landfill. Finally, it allows the agent to cover a broader area than water alone.
F-500 EA also has superb burn back resistance characteristics. Once the F-500 EA is applied, the area will not fuel the fire. Firefighters can move on to the next area.
The reduced amount of water required will result in much less runoff and less need to bring in additional vehicles carrying water. For a large landfill fire, this could mean the difference between success and failure.
Finally, from an environmental standpoint, interrupting the free radical chain reaction quickly eliminates the heavy, black smoke and greatly reduces toxins and odors.
Landfills and Water
Water simply doesn’t penetrate deep into landfills and ends up becoming runoff. Depending on the heat produced by a landfill fire, much of the cooling potential of water evaporates before it reaches the surface of the landfill. Water is also ineffective against materials commonly found in landfills, such as plastics, Class B fuels, Class D metals or tires.
Landfills and Foam
Foam is the last agent you would want to use on a landfill. To extinguish a fire, foam must create a perfect blanket and smother the fire. The problem is, foam sits on the surface and doesn’t penetrate into the landfill at all. The thick blanket of foam traps in the heat. There is plenty of oxygen in the landfill underneath the foam blanket to sustain combustion. Even creating a blanket is difficult since a landfill is a three-dimensional fire, and NFPA 11 states, foam is not suitable to three-dimensional fires.