themselves from a similar experience that could effectively ruin their business.”
Background to laundry fires The regular occurrence of laundry fires is very depressing and the fact that there are now not that many is small comfort if you are the owner or general manager of a successful business, and you are awakened at 3 o’clock in the morning by the police or fire service to be told that your operation is blazing. You face not only the awful task of raking through the ruins to see what, if anything, is salvageable, but you have a crowd of disappointed customers all expecting essential deliveries. You are pitched straight into a frantic series of phone calls to your competitors to organise their immediate help, together with making urgent orders for the textiles destroyed in the blaze.
If you are already stretched financially, you then have the unenviable task of seeking immediate loans from you bank at an affordable rate of interest, followed immediately by negotiations with your insurers. Unfortunately, this last is not always straightforward, because even major insurance companies will reject a claim if they believe that you have not honoured your part of the contract, which might be buried in small print.
History
Although the UK Home Office receives a typical 3,000 laundry fires per year reported, most do not result in excessive financial loss or deaths. Fires in small commercial laundries can be swiftly extinguished if they break out during working hours, but if the laundry closes overnight when no-one is present, then even a small blaze rapidly becomes uncontrollable.
The same applies to large laundries, but the consequences are much more dramatic, with blazing infernos making headline news. Typical claims are often upwards of £5m, so if the claim can be legitimately refused it spells disaster for the laundry business. One or two claims per year still exceed £5m and the frequency appears stubbornly persistent.
Both insurer demands and government legislation now require every business to be equipped with in-date fire extinguishers for staff trained to use them, but as far as laundries are concerned, the requirement is only borderline adequate. It has been noted in at least one experiment, with cigarette
Conslusion based on work so far
The most likely cause of spontaneous combustion is an exothermic chemical oxidation reaction between unremoved contamination and the oxygen in the aA, leading to an exponential rise in textile temperature until the auto-ignition point is reached. The key is to ensure that decontamination is essentially complete. 2. Reduction of the risk of this happening after laundering requires good detergency together with an emulsifier designed to cope with the full range of HLB (hydrophilic-lipophilic balance) values for all contaminants likely to be present. Many common emulsifiers do not do this, but leading chemicals suppliers worldwide are well able to offer detergents and broad range emulsifiers, with appropriate dosages, stage times and temperatures which reduce the risk to a very low level. The critical classifications include garage work, spa textiles, and food work carrying fatty proteins, but this list is by no means complete. Spontaneous combustion appears to be possible on almost any contract.
3. Risk reduction during and after drycleaning demands a searching solvent with a high KB (kauri-butanol) value, together with the right detergent and appropriate dosages, stage times and temperatures using a two-bath process.
4. Any residual risk can then be reduced further by ensuring a thorough cooldown after tumble drying or heat finishing, but this is no substitute for proper decontamination in the first place.
5. Programming tumblers always to cool down to below 40C (for example) at end of cycle can be achieved with modern programmable dryers, and this would be a much better alternative to the one described in the reader query (which might be regarded as hopelessly out of date and certainly impractical). One might argue that any such condition of a policy is so impractical and unfair as to be set aside in any dispute, but that is beyond the scope of this article.
lighters deliberately left in workwear pockets entering a tunnel finisher and every spare operative standing by with an extinguisher, the staff only just managed to put out the resulting blaze. Where laundries equipped with sprinkler
systems have experienced a fire, the damage has usually been much less, but sprinklers are no substitute for fire prevention. The problem has been identification of the reasons for fires which break out in the middle of the night, when the laundry is completely and safely shut down. The recurring mystery is what causes this so- called ‘spontaneous combustion’ why does it cause such widespread destruction and how can it be foreseen and prevented?
Probable causes of spontaneous combustion Most launderers are familiar with the normal fire risks from careless smokers and from electrical short circuits. These risks are the same as in any office building or industrial factory and there is no reason for them to make laundries any more unsafe than premises in other sectors. They are countered by good staff training and supervision and by regular safety checks and effective risk assessment. These measures appear to have had
little effect on incidences of spontaneous combustion. There has to be a reason why laundries experience fires that break out in the middle of the night, when the laundry has been empty and quiet for several hours. One clue is the frequency with which a chief fire officer has found the probable seat of the fire to be in the finished goods area. At least one laundry with CCTV has footage showing a pile of clean napkins appearing to explode to initiate the fire, flinging flaming textiles in all directions and enabling rapid propagation. One laundry in a small factory unit experienced two fires in the finished goods area in a short period, but the fires did not spread to the rest of the premises. Their solution was to separate out the piles of freshly ironed or tumbled work before closing for the night. They still got the occasional fire (possibly about once a year thereafter) but the damage was limited to just one pile of clean goods, and they managed to deal with the resulting smell. One on-premises laundry in a residential institution experienced four fires over the space of less than a month. Investigation revealed changes in staff (with an inexperienced new team) and strong suspicion regarding accuracy of manual detergent dosing and wash cycle selection on the washer extractors used.
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