Fire Pre-Plans – What to Know When Things Get Hot

History shows us that many facilities handling hazardous materials have experienced major fires that have had a profound impact on personnel, caused extreme damage to the facility, and resulted in severe business interruption. Even with the lessons learned from past incidents and the subsequent implementation of highly reliable safeguards, major fires still occur. More often than not, successful mitigation of the consequences from a major fire depends to a greater extent on the efforts put on the planning side than the actual firefighting after the occurrence. In other words, a facility that is aware of its own firefighting capabilities and has a solid plan to maximize the available resources is more likely to be successful in bringing the fire under control with minimum possible damage.

A fire pre-plan describes major aspects related to a specific fire scenario, which includes the available firefighting resources, the materials involved, individual responsibilities, and factors that may cause fire to escalate. Fire pre-plans should be a “living” document that aligns with the facility firefighting philosophy and is frequently updated to capture the changes in process conditions and firefighting resources. How do we then develop a fire pre-plan that has plant-wide buy-in and is dynamic in its very essence? The process of developing a fire pre-plan should involve all the stakeholders that are directly or indirectly concerned with the facility emergency response plan and ought to be built on the foundation of a detailed “Fire Hazard Analysis” (FHA) of the facility.

An FHA is referred to as a “Fire Hazard and Mitigation Analysis” (FHMA) when it also includes a thorough review and analysis of available and necessary mitigations that already exist and/or those that may be recommended at the facility, in addition to examining the potential consequences of the fire. Such a process ensures a more comprehensive examination of both the fire hazards and the available protection systems, emergency response capabilities, and other supporting resources.

This paper will illustrate how unit-specific fire pre-plans can be developed using the data derived from the FHMA. The stakeholder involvement and interaction of a well-conducted FHMA develops ownership of this unique pre-plan development and implementation process. Moreover, the resultant pre-plan will be an evergreen document that can be easily updated to include site changes.