Warehouses storing hazardous materials pose a particular threat, notes Adair Lewis
Hazardous material warehouses risk review
being warehouses used to store hazardous materials. These can be huge, anonymous buildings on a large site and be surrounded by external tanks and different elements of processing plant, while the warehouse itself contains substantial stocks of unknown reactive products. A fire can develop rapidly, leading to explosions occurring without warning and with potentially lethal consequences. In some cases, radioactive isomers and biohazards may also be present to pose additional dangers. Thankfully, there have been just ten major
O
fires in hazardous material warehouses in the past ten years, but these have led to losses totalling over £20m and have caused a great deal of discomfort and concern, not only for firefighters but also for residents in the immediate neighbourhoods that were living downwind of the fires. Allowing for the rounding factors inherent in
the database, two of these fires were deliberately started and four were of unknown origin. The nature of the materials stored and the intensity of the fire would make the investigation of these incidents extremely hard to undertake, but it is difficult to understand why anyone would want to deliberately set fire to a warehouse full of hazardous materials. Only one of these fires occurred during the hours of darkness (6pm to 6am), although six occurred at an unrecorded time of day. The small numbers involved, however, render any conclusions not statistically significant.
54 OCTOBER 2019
www.frmjournal.com
F ALL of the premises that firefighters are called to attend, warehouses must be the most daunting, the worst of these
Not surprisingly, one of the fires concerned
involved acetylene cylinders, widely regarded as one of the most hazardous materials to be commonly encountered in industry. The other problem encountered was lack of firefighting water, which is also unsurprising in view of the capacities of some of the warehouses concerned and the heat release rates of the materials that may have been involved. An associated factor which is not addressed in the statistics is the volume of firefighting water that may have to be retained and subsequently handled and processed following the fire to protect the environment. This is a significant loss which is not included in the database. The financial losses associated with
warehouse fires are enormous; they account for 11.9% of all losses in large fires and in the past ten years have totalled some £459m. Fortunately, warehouses in which hazardous materials are stored account for only a small proportion of this amount. Looking at the insurance components of the losses, whereas over 40% of the losses in warehouses as a whole is accounted for by the buildings, this is only 10% where hazardous materials are involved. That is because hazardous materials are valuable commodities, which is illustrated by the losses in hazardous materials warehouses being more than twice as high per square metre than those for warehouses in general. Curiously for warehouses, over a third (33.6%) of the losses associated with those containing hazardous materials is due to the loss of machinery and plant. The reasons for this figure are not
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