Play on the third day of the qualifiers for the high profile Australian Open tennis tournament was completely cancelled because of the ‘unhealthy’ quality of the ‘smoke filled’ air caused by the country’s ongoing bushfire crisis. The danger to players had been highlighted 24 hours earlier...
A battery operated mobile phone bank has been blamed for starting a fire in the cabin of a Virgin Atlantic flight that was forced to make an emergency landing at Boston airport in America. Despite smoke filling the jet’s cabin all 217 passengers were safely evacuated...
A fire that raged quickly through a barn at a poultry farm in the American state of Michigan killed around 300,000 hens before firefighters could control it. About 50 people who worked in the cage-free barn were evacuated safely and the fire was prevented from spreading...
Dubai police seized more than 25,000 fake fire prevention products during two raids carried out on warehouses in the Raz Al Khor Industrial area The raids were part of a wider police department exercise to cut down counterfeiting and forgery groups that saw a wide ranger...
2020 will see the realisation of the UAE’s ambition to hold and deliver a world class event showcasing it’s culture, history and future aspirations – Expo 2020. With multiple infrastructure projects improving the connectivity across the region and future projects coming on-line, it re-affirms the...
It is important that the fire service, engineers and designers along with aviation professionals collaborate to achieve creative solutions to allow for innovation and expansion within the aviation industry writes Aaron Johnson, Fire & Building Code Strategist. In 2018, a report released by Aerospace Property Consultants1...
With challenging weather, desert terrain and a 711.7 nautical mile (1,318 kilometre) coastline the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) National Search and Rescue Centre (NSRC) provides federal search and rescue (SAR) services for all land, sea and mountain rescues. Tom Withington puts the NSRC in the...
Previously damaged buildings stand a much lower chance of retaining essential structural integrity in order to survive a fire event, reflects Jamie Hutchison, Marketing Executive, Belzona UK and as concrete is a globally popular construction material in the world, when a repair is needed reducing...
Wherever a wildfire breaks out it causes turmoil with farmers worrying about their crops and cattle; rural residents fearing for the safety of themselves, families and their homes; while native animals try to flee from the flames. However, to describe the wildfires of 2019 as...
The world’s first ISO approved drone standards have been announced by the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) following a 12-month period of consultation with drone professionals, academics, businesses and the general public. The final publication of these new international safety and quality Standards for Unmanned Aircraft...
RISE Fire Research in Sweden run an open database to gather classifications of materials and products that have been tested according to EN 45545-2 – Railway applications – Fire protection on railway vehicles – Part 2: Requirements for fire behaviour of materials and components, Anna...
Mass transit applications are becoming an ever-increasing focus as we look to create the infrastructure to deal with the continuing growth in the world’s population. Here Kelvin Miller, Sales Director at industrial fire detection specialists Patol, considers the increasing role of thermal fire detection in...
NFPA 72 provides the latest safety provisions to meet society’s changing fire detection, signalling, and emergency communications demands. In addition to the core focus on fire alarm systems, the Code includes requirements for mass notification systems used for weather emergencies; terrorist events; biological, chemical, and...
While air travel in all its forms is statistically one of the safest means of transportation, it is a fact that despite our best efforts, aviation incidents and accidents do sometimes occur reflects chris thain, Business Development Manager, Fire Protection Services, G3 Systems Ltd. At airports...
The United States Fire Administration develops reports on selected, fire related subjects relating to major fires throughout USA. One of the most recent is entitled FIREBOATS THEN AND NOW… The first recorded fireboat was built in 1765 for the Sun Fire Insurance Company in London. This...
Firefighters at Egypt’s Sharm El Sheikh airport were praised for their speedy reaction when a plane belonging to Ukraine’s SkyUp airline developed a fire as it was landing. The flames were from a tyre on which hydraulic oil had been leaked but they were extinguished before...
More than 160 people had to be evacuated when fire broke out in a residential building and neighbouring premises in the Al Hamra area of Umm Al Quwain. No injuries were reported. The cause of the fire is under investigation. However, fire chief Colonel DR Sim...
One person died after a car flipped over and caught fire near the Trade Centre roundabout in Dubai causing heavy lunchtime traffic delays in the area. Although firefighters rushed to the scene and controlled the blaze they were not able to save the driver because...
An early morning fire that was reportedly caused by an electrical power surge burned 12 corpses among the 102 bodies being kept in a mortuary at a teaching hospital complex in Osun State, Nigeria. It was only the speeding intervention of the college’s in-house security and...
At least 65 passengers died when a fire ripped through three carriages of a train travelling between the cities of Karachi and Rawalpindi in Pakistan. Sheik Rashid Ahmed, Pakistan’s minister for railways, said that the fire was started by the explosion of a portable gas cyclinder...
Two Emirati brothers, aged three and one-and-a-half years old, died in the Mina area of Abu Dhabi after being left alone in a vehicle with its engine running and later caught fire. Alerted to the incident police and civil defence reached the scene very quickly and...
Every year, thousands of volunteer fire fighters give up their free time and risk their lives to help their follow citizens and Australian Pump Industries, decided to find out what makes a fire fighting volunteer tick! The company launched a programme to pull entries from volunteer...
A factory fire killed 19 workers in the eastern Chinese county of Ninghai, despite the government’s crackdown on safety precautions that have to be introduced in oil and chemical industrial sites. The policy was introduced after a 2015 explosion in a Tianjin chemical warehouse in 2015...
Three neighbouring governments answered an appeal for help as the Chouf and Metri regions of Lebanon were hit by a series of massive wildfires described by Civil Defence director Raymond Khattar as the ‘worst to have hit the country in decades.’ Cyprus , Italy and Greece...
When a tank farm manager in Germany commissioned TÜV SÜD Industrie Service to develop a fire protection concept the technical experts, thinking out of the box, proposed a solution which relies on early fire detection using a fully automated infrared measurement system as a key...
Prevention is always better than cure, and there are few better examples than with fires. If fires can only survive when there is oxygen to fuel them, removing it from the air is an effective way to ensure that the environment remains fire-free. Oxygen reduction...
Fire Middle East explores a vital Whitepaper : Understanding the risks of working in confined spaces published by Honeywell Safety Products which explains how to identify a confined space, giving examples and characteristics as well as warning about the specific conditions that come together to...
Misconceptions about employee safety in the workplace tend to significantly impact on aspects such as employee retention, job satisfaction and financial gain (or losses) in a business, writes Daryl Wake, Business Development, Universal Site Monitoring. Safety remains a paramount concern for the industrial sector worldwide,...
Providing October FME readers insight into the design and development process when creating new protective garments is Roger Startin, Joint Managing Director of Bristol Uniforms which for more than 60 years has been at the forefront of firefighter PPE design. New fibres and fabrics Technical designers...
There is currently no test standard providing a robust set of proven and well researched tests to assess the performance capabilities of video flame detectors (VFD) and video smoke detectors (VSD) in anticipated service environments. To assess video fire detectors, sufficiently detailed and well demonstrated...
Maximum Foreseeable Loss (MFL) events are caused by one of three main events. These events are fire, explosion or equipment failure with fire being the primary cause. B. Aaron Johnson, Fire & Building Code Strategist, and Justin Biller, p.e., fsfpe consider the contribution of fire...
A recent project in the GCC has been the catalyst for this article from Peter Stephenson, Business Development Manager, Warringtonfire, which highlights the typical process and hazards/risks that should be considered when assessing the fire & life safety requirements for a desalination plant. With the global...
As organisations within the MENA region have been announcing big money plans for new electrical power installations two recent, highly disruptive and much publicised incidents in America have highlighted the necessity of ensuring the equipment is super-efficient and protected with effective fire safety equipment. It was...
The smokey atmosphere created by the huge wildfires that have swept through bushland in California has become a problem for the state’s winemakers even though many of their vinyards have escaped direct damage from the blazes. According to the California Association of Winegrape Growers most vintners...
More than 9,500 residents living within a 12-mile radius of an ammunition dump in the Krasnoyarsk region of Siberia had to be evacuated after fires broke out in stores housing an estimated 55,000 artillery shells. There were only six reports of injuries, with none of them...
An early morning fire killed five children aged between eight month and seven years as they slept in a day care centre in the town of Erie in the American state of Pennsylvania. It was later reported that the blaze struck only eight months after the...
A series of explosions sparked by a fire at a warehouse storing weapons and ammunition killed one person and injured 29 people in south Baghdad The fire also ignited several rockets which emerged from the building and struck neighbourhoods several miles away inuring several children. A...
A fierce blaze which swept through the plastic roofs of a slum in the capital of Bangladesh, Dhaka, destroyed about 15,000 homes and left 50,000 people homeless. It took firefighter more than six hours to extinguish the flames but no deaths were reported because a lot...
More than 200 passengers who were about to board plane at Beijing Airport were forced by a fire to abandon their plans to fly to Tokyo. As they approached the A330-300 belonging to Air China smoke started to emerge from a cargo area at the front...
Fishing boats and passing ships, were alerted by coastguards who had no patrols nearby, rescued 245 people from a burning ferry in southern Philippine waters, but a one-year-old girl and two other people died. The fire had started in the ferry’s engine room soon after it...
A massive fire ripped through destroyed the rows of port cabins housing nearly 1,000 workers employed by Darwish Engineering on the Sharjah-Ajman border, a few kilometres away from the Sharjah Investment Centre. There were no casualties but all the workers had to be found temporary accommodation...
Federal authorities have opened a criminal investigation into the dive boat fire that killed 34 people off the Southern California coast. The Department of Justice have confirmed it was participating in the joint investigation. This comes after agents searched the offices of the boat's owner, Truth...
At least 13 people died and dozens more were injured after a suspected arson attack on an animation studio in Kyoto, Japan. Police said that after a man broke into the Kyoto Animation studio and sprayed an unidentified liquid inside the three-storey building which was...
Volvo has launched a worldwide recall of more than half a million four-cylinder diesel cars after discovering a fault that could lead to them catching fire. The cars sold over the past five years have a plastic engine manifold which the Swedish manufacturers says ‘can...
One of America’s leading nuclear research stations had to be shut down as a precaution after a wildfire blazed through 90,000 acres of grassland nearby. All the laboratory staff were evacuated safely as from the site in the state of Idaho and firefighters prevented the flames...
The chief architect of France’s historic monuments is afraid the vaulted ceilings of the fire ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris could collapse in the heat wave that has been sweeping across Europe. Phillippe Villeneuve said the Cathedral’s walls are still saturated with water sprayed by...
Fire is often associated with heavy materials and firefighting equipment losses and casualties and is a key public security concern for authorities all over the world and the use of fireproof material can be traced back to ancient Rome reflects Hakan Ozyigit, Regional Director of...
As an architect or engineer, when you design a facility’s life safety system, your primary goal is to achieve compliance with state and local fire code requirements explains Rodger Reiswig, SET, Fellow and Vice President, Industry Relations, Johnson Controls. While that approach can help ensure...
Female firefighters are at a high-risk of developing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder and experiencing suicidal thoughts, compared to male firefighters, according to a new study published in May 2019 in the Occupational Medicine Journal. The study found that almost one in three (30%) female firefighters...
Old or new, all buildings are at an increased risk of fire during refurbishment. Here, Paul Henson, Sales and Marketing Director at Ramtech Electronics, looks at the importance of protecting occupants and assets during construction work. 2019 should go down in history as a turning point...