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What 335,000 gallons AFFF looks like


USNRET

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Our fire suppression system suffered a fault and discharged into the hanger bay on Thursday; still cleaning up the mess of tool boxes, aircraft parts, engines metal working brakes, shears, lockers, etc, etc. Now we have 3 days of flushing the piping so it will not corroded out.

Edited by USNRET
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Our fire suppression system suffered a fault and discharged into the hanger bay on Thursday; still cleaning up the mess of tool boxes, aircraft parts, engines metal working brakes, shears, lockers, etc, etc. Now we have 3 days of flushing the piping so it will not corroded out.

 

so what's gone RIGHT for you lately?

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That's just crazy.  Curious, what would be the process of removing?

Seal off all drains to prevent intrusion into bay, treatment plant, etc. Contractor came in and vacuums it up into trailer mounted storage vessels for transfer to hazmat site. This stuff is mixed as at 3:1 water to AFFF concentrate as it dispenses so we used 200,000+ gallons of water. We have on site water storage, pumps, generators etc for instances when we are off the grid plus the municipal water supply could never deliver the volume required. With the IR sensors you get warning of first detection and then horns / strobes for second sensor and you have 10 seconds to reach an ABORT station. In this case a short in the pull handle (immediate discharge) rendered the Abort commands to be overridden. Unfortunately a few cars go flooded in the parking lot; this stuff is corrosive.

 

edit: The silver lining for us is that it was a malfunction of the customer's fire protection system and we didn't do something stupid like turning on the aircraft's strobe lights in the hanger else I would be looking for a new job at WalMart.

Edited by USNRET
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That's not me, he's to young and in to good of shape, but I can dream about his friend !  :P

 

Never tried a foam party, but I think i would rather a non toxic foam rather than what was in that hanger. If that was the AFFF foam as USNRET described that dude would come out looking worse than I do now !

 

 

That looks like one expensive mess, the cost of the foam plus cleanup is not going to be cheap. 

 

Is corrosion to the plane a problem or is it just hosed/cleaned off somehow ? 

Edited by dtel
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