Fire Prevention

A clean, well-maintained scrapyard can minimize fire hazards—but planning and training for a fire are just as essential.

By Jim Fowler

Knowing that a major fire could be catastrophic, scrap processors think about fire prevention and take steps to prevent it, but—pardon the pun—they rarely make it a front-burner issue.
   Fires seem fairly rare in the scrap industry, but those that do occur are costly, notes Monica McNally, senior vice president of the ISRI-sponsored RecycleGuardsm insurance program. In the past five years, only 3 percent of the total claims in the program were fire related, but they received 28 percent of the claims dollars paid—more than $20 million.
   “Fire protection should be the safety ‘no-brainer,’” says John Gilstrap, ReMA director of safety, “because fire is something we all understand, at least at an elementary level. If you just think about what it is and how it spreads, and you stop that from happening, you control the fire hazards at your facility.”
   In the simplest terms, fire is a straightforward equation of F (fuel) plus I (ignition) plus RE (the right environment). Absent any one of those three, a fire cannot take hold.
   Because the right environment is typically the presence of oxygen, an element in great abundance all around us, fire prevention requires the control of the other two parts of the equation: fuel and ignition.
   Whatever the commodity you’re processing, proper maintenance and housekeeping—two of the three essentials of scrap fire prevention—can reduce both ignition and fuel sources. “If equipment is maintained, properly lubricated, and correctly wired, you greatly cut down on the likelihood of a fire,” Gilstrap says. Further, good housekeeping minimizes the presence of fuel. “If a fire occurs,” he says, “it’s held to a smaller scale because it doesn’t propagate as quickly in a clean environment as it does in a dirty one.”
   The third essential is an emergency plan that instructs employees exactly what to do when a fire occurs. Who sounds the alarm? Who puts out the fire? What do they use to put it out? Who calls the fire department? Who meets the firefighters at the front gate and directs them to the fire? “The emergency plan is critically important for any business, but for the scrap industry in particular,” Gilstrap says.
   He recommends that plant owners work with their local fire department to design a fire prevention and response plan. By getting firefighters involved ahead of time, they “will know what to expect, where to go, and what they are going to find when they get there,” Gilstrap says. “They are not creating the response plan on the scene as the fire is burning.” That’s important, he adds, because “it’s in the first 10 minutes of a fire that the battle is won or lost.”

Keeping things clean
“Housekeeping is critical as it relates to fire prevention,” says Brent Charlton, safety manager at River Metals Recycling LLC (Louisville, Ky.), “and no matter how good it is, I’m never fully satisfied with it—it can always be better.” RMR makes supervisors and managers primarily accountable for housekeeping and makes it a topic of nearly every weekly safety meeting.
   Stacie Miles, safety, environment, and health specialist for Pacific Coast Recycling LLC (Long Beach, Calif.), includes housekeeping in every inspection she does. “The worse the housekeeping gets, the more dangerous it gets and the more hazards it causes,” she says. “That goes from spills to debris to dirt coming in with the loads of scrap. It all falls under safety and fire protection. My big thing is to make sure employees clean up the incident, whatever it is, when it happens.”
   Schnitzer Steel Industries Inc. (Portland, Ore.) also makes housekeeping everyone’s responsibility. “As part of our fire protection effort, we want our employees to be diligent about their surroundings,” says Rosie Neisz, director of safety. “If they see something amiss, we want them to report it. That’s what we do in all aspects of safety—we empower our people to bring any safety issue to their supervisor. If their supervisor isn’t available, they can call on anyone in management. We have an open-door policy when it comes to safety issues.”
   Paper recyclers need to be especially vigilant about keeping their facilities clean. At E.L. Harvey & Sons Inc. (Westborough, Mass.), “the company’s supervisors are well aware of the importance of housekeeping,” says Safety Director Jerry Sjogren, “and [they] realize that fire is a huge enemy to paper processors—that it could put us out of business.
   “If people aren’t paying attention and allow paper and debris to get up against a motor, you get friction and heat that can cause a fire,” Sjogren explains. “You have to be on your toes not to allow paper dust to build up in motor control centers. They have to be cleaned and maintained on a regular basis.” Harvey & Sons workers check and clean around those areas daily, and machine operators and maintenance personnel continuously watch for dust buildup. “As part of our safety program we have quarterly inspections and do a walk-through, and dust buildup is one of the things we are checking on,” he says.
   Al Tomes of Louis Padnos Iron & Metal Co. (Holland, Mich.) is proud to report that his company has never had a paper fire. Employees clean the plant several times a day to make sure there is no paper on the floor, and smoking is prohibited in the building. The company cleans out the plant’s HVAC system three times a year and regularly vacuums all electric motors—even those on ceiling exhaust fans.
   Padnos workers pay extra attention to housekeeping around machines about to be maintained, Tomes says. “Anything we’re going to be working on is cleaned out, vacuumed, and if we have to, we get a fire hose and spray it down. Fire extinguishers and fire hoses are at the ready while torching is going on.” They work on mobile equipment in the maintenance shop, not in the paper plant.
   Like paper, shredder fluff is a particularly combustible scrapyard product. John Hayworth, national director of environment, health, and safety for Metal Management Inc. (Newark, N.J.), says on hot summer days, when there is a fresh pile of shredder fluff on the ground, “it’s still fairly warm, and then the temperature builds up even more, and all it takes is a tiny spark to set it off—[it’s] almost spontaneous combustion.” His solution is to remove fluff from the property as quickly as possible or keep it moist.
   Miller Compressing Co. (Milwaukee) cleans its shredder system nightly to prevent fluff buildup, says Brian Zoeller, safety director. Sadoff & Rudoy Industries LLP (Fond du Lac, Wis.) uses sensors in the shredder’s fluff bins to monitor the heat. But even with a wet system, says Safety Director Jeremiah Heitman, “sometimes conditions are right for a fluff fire, [and] all you need is a spark or something hot enough to set it off.”
   Other scrapyards further reduce their shredder fire risks by refusing to accept certain highly flammable materials, including cylinders, intact gas tanks, and magnesium motor blocks. Shine Brothers Corp. (Spencer, Iowa) has made a big push to educate its customers about what it will and will not accept, says Mark Norman, corporate safety director, because “if we control what comes into the yard, we can control our fire exposure.”
   Another piece of equipment with special housekeeping concerns is the wire chopper. “You can have spontaneous combustion with dust buildup in a wire chopping line,” Norman says, “so housekeeping is a big issue for fire protection.” In fact, he says, “a fire in a chopping line is seldom caused by anything other than poor housekeeping. We have to do a stringent cleanup every day. It involves getting on top of the machines to get all of the dust particles down to get it as clean as possible by vacuuming and sweeping.”
   The company is in the process of installing an air-quality system that will use a cyclone to suck out 80 percent to 90 percent of the dust while the choppers are operating.

Fire-minded maintenance
Whereas housekeeping can reduce or eliminate fuel sources, “regular maintenance will, for example, stop bearings from heating up and doing things that could cause an additional ignition source that we don’t need,” Shine’s Norman says.
   E.L. Harvey workers also look for heat ignition sources during maintenance. An outside firm inspects the motor control centers using infrared sensors, Sjogren says. “They also check the terminals inside the motor control centers to see if they are loose. If they are loose and generating friction, you get heat.”
   Electrical sparks can be another ignition source, so at RMR, “we do regular inspections to be sure breaker boxes aren’t damaged,” Charlton says. “If there is a problem, we use qualified electricians for repairs and installation so that circuit breakers and wiring are sized correctly.”
   Maintenance can be as simple—and as essential—as changing a light bulb. Padnos uses metal-halide, high-intensity-discharge lighting. If this type of bulb explodes—as it can at the end of its life­span—the tungsten inside can reach 2,500 degrees F, easily igniting paper dust. To prevent that possibility, workers change the bulbs every five years, before they reach the end of their lifespan.
   Proper maintenance also can control one particular source of fuel—hydraulic fluid. A hydraulic leak was probably the cause of a March 2005 fire at RMR that destroyed the hydraulic building for the company’s 3,200-ton shear. “A fine mist of hydraulic oil spray on hot motors will ignite fairly easily,” Charlton explains.
   The firm saved the shear, but it took eight months to replace the hydraulic system and rebuild the room, this time with heat sensors above the hydraulic sources. “If we have a fire, the sensors will detect the temperature change and shut the hydraulic system down so it won’t continue to feed a fire,” Charlton says. “We’ve also installed a video camera in the hydraulic building so the operators in the shear control tower can see the room continuously.”
   At Padnos, head electrician Dave Russcher uses a fire-detection system that relies on nylon string stretched across the ceiling of each of the firm’s operations buildings, above the shredder, and above the various hydraulic pump sets of the metal and paper balers. The string melts at about 216 degrees F, releasing a spring-tension switch that sounds the alarm system and, if it’s above a hydraulic set, trips the limit switch and shuts down the system.
   As a further safety measure, a program Russcher installed will shut the hydraulic pumps down if a line breaks, causing a loss of oil flow in the system.
   “The goal is to do the maintenance and housekeeping to prevent the fire,” Tomes says. But if the company does have a fire, he adds, Russcher “has put all of these other things in place to try and minimize the damage.”

Precautionary planning
Housekeeping and maintenance notwithstanding, scrapyards must have a written fire prevention plan per OSHA regulations. At a minimum, the plan must include
• a map marking exits and the rally points where employees meet outside the building;
• emergency reporting procedures; and
• the titles of emergency coordinators, including which ones are responsible for calling the fire department.
   The FPP at Mervis Industries Inc. (Danville, Ill.) is tied closely to its OSHA-mandated emergency action plan, which describes the company’s emergency evacuation procedures and exit route assignments, its procedures to account for all employees after the emergency evacuation, and specific employees’ rescue and medical duties.
   Mervis’ FPP designates a plan coordinator—the local manager acting as the representative of the corporate safety director—and 14 activities for which that person is responsible. The plan also specifies
• the facility’s potential fire hazards and fire prevention measures;
• fire protection equipment and systems and the procedures for maintaining them;
• the four types of fires, according to the National Fire Protection Association’s classification system, and the type of extinguisher to use on each;
• building floor plans that indicate the location of fire extinguishers and sprinkler systems; and
• housekeeping procedures for eliminating or minimizing the risk of fire due to improperly stored or disposed of materials.
   The final and longest section of the Mervis FPP deals with employee training for fire prevention and response, which Joe Bateman, the company’s corporate safety director, calls crucial.
Some training applies to the facility’s entire workforce. Pacific Coast Recycling trains employees on its fire policies and procedures, then it announces a fire drill for a specific date. “We have everyone act as if there is a fire in a certain area and react to it,” Miles says. “Next we do [a drill] at an unannounced time and date to see how the reaction is.
   “We always learn from the drills, and the employees are happy to do [them] because the drills give them an opportunity to tell us what’s best for them, and they appreciate that,” she says.  “We also realize that practice makes perfect, and if you don’t practice, the guys don’t know what to do and their response time is extremely slow,” she adds. “You have to be quick with fire, otherwise you have a problem.”
   Macon Iron & Paper Stock Co. Inc. (Macon, Ga.) does a “great deal of training to make sure everyone knows what the emergency equipment is all about and how to use it,” says Al Elvins Jr., director of human resources and safety. “We even set pallets on fire from time to time so our employees can practice putting them out,” he says. “We believe it’s better to spend the time to train our people to do the right thing.”
   Other training is aimed at workers with specific responsibilities in the event of a fire. Each Padnos facility has an emergency response team trained to secure the area in the event of a fire. During the company’s annual safety-awareness week, the local fire department trains employees on how to use fire extinguishers and put out small fires. The company also trains employees on specific types of fires, such as turnings and magnesium, that water cannot extinguish.
   At E.L. Harvey, Sjogren trains 30 employees as a brigade for fighting an incipient fire—one that is just beginning to form. (Responding to a fire is completely voluntary, he notes.) “We use a 1 -1/2-inch hose and teach them things such as not turning your back on a fire, having someone back you up with another fire hose or extinguisher, and how to sweep the fire to put it out,” he says.
   Further training addresses likely fire scenarios. “If a load starts to burn inside a building,” Sjogren says, “our loader operators are trained to push it outside, get a bucket of sand, and dump it on top of the pile to smother it. Our packer drivers are trained to squeeze the load and put as much pressure on it as possible to keep the air out, thus helping to contain the fire until the fire department arrives.”
   Ultimately, “communication is the key to making sure employees know as much about the firefighting plans as you do,” says Greg Houghton, operations manager for American Compressed Steel Inc. (Kansas City, Mo.). The best strategy for success, he asserts, is to follow the five Ps: prior planning prevents poor performance.
   “If you think through everything that could go wrong and communicate that to your people before it happens,” he says, “maybe it never will.”

Jim Fowler is the retired publisher and editorial director of Scrap.