Fire Extinguisher Awareness

One of the things I can’t understand is how we’ve had major accidents happen and we haven’t learned from our mistakes.
This is Gary from Refining Community and I wanted to bring everybody’s awareness to fire extinguishers. Fire extinguishers are hung, if you’ll notice, on a special rack up off the ground, off the grade, away from pockets of water. They’re usually inspected by, hmm, a lot of plants it’s third party, the guards, or the safety department.

One of the things that I’ve been seeing is that some fire extinguishers are left to sit in either dirt water on the grade. The reason this is so important, we had a major fatality – every fatality’s major – at a plant where they charged the fire extinguisher. The bottom had corroded from sitting on the concrete in a wet
environment and when the charge of the CO2 hit it blew the bottom out and blew it up and broke their neck. So that’s a lesson learned that we don’t want repeated.

Any time you see a fire extinguisher sitting on the ground, even temporarily, let’s say somebody’s doing a weld job and they have a temporary fire extinguisher. It’s okay for one day or one shift but it should be taken away. It should be put away and the ones that should be in the bracket with the covering on it – that’s how they should be. So I think we need to come back to our basics when it comes to fire extinguishers.

-Gary Pitman Coker Subject Matter Expert, Refining Community

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