Waxahachie Fire

Did anyone else see that ladder truck get engulfed by fire?

Heck of a fire.

Magnablend Waxahachie Texas fire fighting fail on YouTube.

Holy crap!!
The firefighters don't seemed overly concerned as the wall of flaming liquid approaches.

-Blast

I'm glad those firefights got clear.

But a chemical factory ("ammonia, sulfuric acid, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid, phosphoric acid") only 1000 ft from an elementary school? Yeah, sounds like where I'd want to send my kid.

Sue

Which was there first ? The school or the factory ?

Anybody know how much those things cost? Ouch.

Less than 20 miles from my house.

Yikes.

Wonder what a new ladder truck runs for? Or even a used one?

Close to $1M new probably. A lot of these are fitted out to the request of the particular FD that orders them.

For what they had probably right at a million. Our ladder truck in 2002 cost about 750k.
Watching that video gave me the hebie geebies! Years ago we were fighting a fully involved barn fire. I'm on the first engine in. Myself and a buddy pull a 2 1/2 inch diameter line across the front of the barn. We duck down out of the heat behind a trailer waiting for water. When the hose started to inflate i cracked the nozzle to let out the air and the whole thing just deflated again! Looking underneath the trailer we saw that the hose was on fire!
Behind us was an 8ft high stockade fence, in front was a wall of flame. (Did you know that with the proper motivation you can climb a 8ft high stockade fence in full turnouts with airpak on!)

That chemical fire was an education to watch. It confused even the trained firefighters. It was deceptive because at first it looked like it was confined to the building and the nearby concrete apron, then the chemicals poured SLOWLY but steadily across the concrete. And then before you know it, it's a raging inferno and they lost a whole fire truck. I'm not gonna' criticize the firefighters, because this morning they are probably sitting around and feeling terrible that they lost a $750K truck. That hurts. It just goes to show how tricky fires can be.

Did anyone notice how thick that black smoke was? Very nasty. This reminds me that I need to get my own a** moving and buy a personal hood for smoke protection. You don't want to be breathing stuff like that - probably all kinds of chemical contamination.

Pete2

Yep, watch the video with one eye on the clock and you'll see the fire start to move at 14 seconds into the video and by the 52 sec mark the truck is engulfed -- 38 seconds; the video ends at 1 minute & 10 seconds.

I work in a facility with all of the above mentioned chemicals (and a whole lot worse). We have an excellent relationship with the local FD but I think they would tell you that they will rely on us to tell them what X and Y is if there was a response.

Hazmat crews will be more comfortable with these calls but their response time is measured in hours, not minutes (4hrs I think for an initial response for my area).

Actually the replacement cost is about 1.5 million according to the Chief.
Firehouse article

Watch the embedded video for much more detail on the event.

School: records from at least 2003

Magnablend bought the property on 5-22-06

City fathers: "Which one of these suckers is going to bring in the most money?"

Cynical Sue

I would not permit my children to attend a school so close to a facility like that.

I guess one good thing ... is that once the fire truck was in danger, the firemen didn't try to save the equipment when the situation was a lost cause. If someone had tried to jump into the cab at the last moment, they could have burned to death along with the truck. Glad that didn't happen.

Pete2

The truck was a 1,988 worth 100k or so I'd guess . We buy new sticks for 750k, a 24 Y/o one is not worth much.

With the jacks out,nobody could jump in and move it without first going to the rear and retracting the jacks, taking it out of interlock,pto etc.

One could Monday morning quarterback the placement of the rig (and plenty are) but I was not there so I'll hold my thoughts on that.

Although the old saying with chem./ haz mat is up hill up wind......

As far as I can tell, they did the right thing. The situation got dangerous for those responding, so they moved away to safety. No use putting a person's life in danger over some equipment.

I've seen similar things happen in construction. Guys running machines along side a ditch and the ditch starts to slowly cave in. Sometimes it's worth it to try and save the equipment, but most of the time it's better to just jump out and get away while the equipment falls in. At the end of the day, the equipment can be replaced.....the operator can't.

Well...its a chemical fire you do it differant( well you should anyway ). You should be ON AIR for one thing,along with upwind and uphill that way it won't be flowing towards you .You need to find out whats burning so you know if you should use water on it at all ,also with whats one fire you'll know isolation distances along with recomended fire fighting distances and on and on.

Back when I was still an active firefighter, I had one or two of those "whoa time to go" moments, and the gear gets REALLY light for a few moments.
I was sounding a floor in a fully involved house with my Halligan during a primary search - THUMP the floor - crawl a bit - THUMP! THUMP! Whoosh! the Halligan went right through the floor and fell out of my hand...time to follow the hose back out...quickly.

I watched/re-watched the video carefully, and I can't see how they would have done anything differently. The job is to get up close and personal with the fire -- for the bucket to be effective and in the right place the truck had to be that close. When the chemical fire started floating out of the building on top of firefighting wash, they still had the bucket in the air. It took all that time to bring the guys down, and then the truck was still on supports -- it looks like you could just jump in and drive away, but you can't move the truck until the supports are retracted. There just wasn't enough time.

Sometimes you lose equipment in the course of doing the job. Sometimes the equipment is more expensive, sometimes its cheaper. This one was a little more painful than most for the accountants. Glad everyone made it clear in time -- sacrificing guys to save equipment is pointless.