This story brought to you by the letter “learn some damned chemistry before you go spraying water on a metal fire, dumbass!”
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hpkiJxWwn1nPeOffnH7m3xhhHqkwD9GUTOAG0
Explosions and fire tore through a block of industrial buildings in South Los Angeles early Wednesday, hurling shrapnel and fist-sized chunks of molten titanium that injured three firefighters.
The metal was inside a company that manufactures titanium golf clubs and it “rained down in a huge fireball of sparks and burning shavings,” Fire Department Battalion Chief Mario Rueda said. “It was unbelievable.”
…
Titanium stacked inside one building exploded when it was hit with water from fire hoses, Rueda said.
Well, DUH.
And the author of the article goes out of his way to display his ignorance of basic science:
Burning titanium creates its own oxygen that feeds the flames, Rueda said.
(Yes, yes, he’s quoting the clearly ignorant fire chief, but he does not correct the statement.)
For those of you who don’t know (and if you don’t, I really hope you’re not a firefighter), titanium when it burns does not “create its own oxygen.” That would probably require some sort of nuclear fusion process. What it does do is burn like magnesium: white hot and angry. Burns like any other fuel… combusts with the oxygen in the air to form titanium oxide.
What titanium looks like when it burns. Don’t look too close… the bright light and UV will blind you.
Magnesium, titanium and other burnable metals become entertaining when some dumbass sprays water on ’em. The metal fire is hot enough that it actually strips the hydrogen off the oxygen in the water molecule, and then combusts with the oxygen… leaving the superheated hydrogen to float upwards to where it can find free oxygen, at which point the hydrogen now does the little combustion dance.
So if you have a titanium fire, do *not* spray water on it.
There are two basic ways to deal with a titanium fire:
1) Cover it with sand, dirt or salt. These are generally non-combustible and will melt, covering the metal with molten glass or molten salt, sheilding it from oxygen. Fire goes out. *Days* later, after things have cooled down (and not before), you can go in and try to make sense of the mess.
2) Run away. Call your insurance company and write off your losses.
#2 there is the sane choice.
Either the firefighter here were criminally ignorant/negligent, or they were mis/under-informed regarding the contents of the facility.
NOTE: if you think you might have a metal fire, and actually think you might want to try to put it out, you need to get a “Class D” fire extinguisher. Expensive, heavy as hell, shoots out not water or carbon dioxide (NOTE: burning metals will happily tear the CO2 molecule to shreds and dine on the oxygen, so don’t use one of those, either), but salt, sand, copper powder, graphite, a few others. There are apparently a few water-based solutions which can be used with titanium, but these are specialty substances, not tap water. Each metal requires a different type of Class D extinguisher. Having seen a few in action (just demonstrations, not, fortunately, on actual fires), they don’t shoot the salt out, they just sort of barf it out. So you have to be right on top of the fire.
Most titanium alloys are pretty fire resistant… you can weld ’em, grind ’em (producing a shower of white – not yellow – sparks), zap ’em with lasers, and the most they’ll do is melt. But pure titanium is reasonably bad news, and pretty much any titanium alloy *will* combust if you get it hot enough, and then supply enough oxidizer.
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http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/xkcd/dacb/
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/xkcd/dae9/
I’ve always tried to avoid fires.
Sodium metal is another thing you keep water away from.
> Sodium metal is another thing you keep water away from.
Most of the time. Sometimes, though…
http://lynx.uio.no/jon/church.html
50 Fun Things For Non-Christians To Do In Church
#25: Hide near the baptismal pool with a block of metallic sodium. At the first mention of “fire and brimstone”, throw it in.
I saw film of a Navy airplane being pushed over side as it burned, and when it hit water it blew chunks of burning titanium, aluminum, and magnesium like a bomb going off. Chunks even stuck to the ship hull and continued to burn. Scary stuff.
On a totally related note, I use a metal rasp and grind off flakes from cast aluminum and magnesium auto parts and use them to burn out tree stumps. And yes, Virginia, DON’T look at the burning metal!!!
Fire. I hate fire. Stuff like this scares me even more than usual.
If you’ve ever seen the video of the USS Intrepid fire, you’ll get Scott’s point about when not to use water to douse a fire. If you don’t know about the incident, in 1967 while off the coast of Vietnam, a Zuni round on a A-4 on the deck cooked off and hit John McCain’s A-4 while he was in it. He climbed out along the refueling probe and jumped just seconds before his aircraft exploded. There was a trained deck fire crew that knew not to use water due to the pools of burning jet fuel, but there were only eight of them, and they were killed early on by other explosions. Untrained teams of sailors, essentially in a panic, started spraying water everywhere, which spread the burning fuel throughout the ship.
In a less apocalyptic vein, it took the Indy car community a remarkably long time to figure out that methanol is miscible with water. The Rick Mears pit fire and the 1980 Michigan pit fire (which almost burned the whole damn place down) were catalysts for a major rethink of safety procedures. If you walk through the pits at an Indy car race, you’ll see numerous buckets of water lying around. The current SOP is to simply douse the fire with as much water as possible, and soak the uniforms of every person near the fire with water, which is important because the flames aren’t visible in daylight. In case of a fuel fire, people start getting splashed almost instantaneously. Crude, but it works.
And as far as burning magnesium goes, Google “Pierre Levegh”. Sheesh.
Oh, forgot to add that Indy cars now use E98, but the procedures are the same.
“Burning titanium creates its own oxygen that feeds the flames, Rueda said.”
I think the chief is not ignorant. He probably tried to explain as simply as possible what happened to a dumb reporter (don’t you find that almost every reporter is a person who knows nothing about anything?). He probably said something like “and burning titanium creates oxygen for itself breaking it out of water”, but the only thing that got through to reports head was “it creates its own oxygen”.
NEVER judge other people based on what a reporter wrote. Even when they “quote” somebody, it is often taken out of context, dumbed down by reporter even more, or just twisted completely. Been there, couldn’t believe what I “said”.
I was at a mars rover press conference where a reporter asked the PI (prinicpal investigator, or science-guy-in-charge) the question:
“If there were a giant footprint on Mars (like from Godzilla), would the rovers be able to tell?”
I swear to God, this was a real question. It was somewhere around 80 days of operation, and Squyres was talking about some liquid-water-related rover finds.
Hardly the dumbest space-probe related question. That’s kinda gotta go to Sheila Jackson Lee, Dem Rep for Houston, who asked at NASA-JPL if the Pathfinder Mars rover would take a picture of the flag Armstrong planted there.
Internet-wide nitwit alert . . .
The ship was the Forrestal, not the Intrepid. The aircraft with the Zuni that started the fire was mounted on an F-4B, not an A-4.