Be careful with your sparkle wrenches! It appears that the Colebrookdale Railroad in Boyertown, PA had an incident, where an accidental fire was started via acetylene torch in their converted gondola passenger car:

April 18, 2022 RAILCAR FIRE, COLEBROOKDALE RAILROAD , BOYERTOWN





It looks like the railroad handled it quite well, with a railroad worker attempting to put the fire out with an extinguisher, and then calling the fire department when it didn't go out all the way. More pictures at the link above.

That could have been a LOT worse...

Just a thought on the sequence of those events from a retired career firefighter. If the fire is serious enough to need an extinguisher, use your own or have someone else use their cell phone to call the Fire Dept. before you take action. A lot of places are remote enough to be at least 10 minutes away from a Fire Dept. dispatch. The reality is that sometimes just being 2 minutes away is too long a wait and the fire destroys whatever it's burning despite the applied extinguisher. Notify first and then attack the problem. That backs your action up in case the fire is more than you thought it was.

You're certainly right on the money here, but I think given how this was handled? I think it also speaks to the capabilities of the volunteers here. In the grand scheme of things this doesn't rate high on my scale of Cluster-F-ery (really ought to make a proper chart for that...) considering that no one got hurt, and as much as it's a crummy problem it's fixable.

Without knowing how many people were on the ground, both the extinguisher and phone call could've been going simultaneously. And the firefighters could've shown up to an inferno with a bunch of people panicking. In this case they didn't. This could also be another example of proper volunteer training and prep for dealing with that unexpected crisis that is bound to crop up somewhere. And everyone here knows they will happen at some point, it's just a question of what happens and how deep that crater ends up being.

I agree with you that all in all, things went well. I was commenting from an after-action- how-could-we-have-done-this-better perspective. Thankfully everyone kept their cool, the extinguisher grabbed was serviced and in working condition. Apparently there was more than just the person with the torch present when the fire broke out to alert the torch user he had a problem, or maybe the person just grabbed the extinguisher for him. Well done.

Any time the Fire Dept. arrives to find the fire out is a good call, literally, and figuratively.

Learning how to use an extinguisher starts off just like having to initiate CPR . The first thing you're supposed to do is call 911. Get your back-up moving.

Torching metal with wood behind it is a recipe for problems, should have a watcher standing by with a big water hose and an extinguisher....

Torching metal with unknown material behind it is an even bigger recipe for problems...

If necessary to cut metal with wood behind it consider a metal cutoff wheel on a disk grinder. Cut a little, check for smoke, spray water to cool. Wait for signs of smoke, then proceed when clear, slower but safer.

The slag (molten steel) from an oxy-acc cutting torch is much hotter than sparks from a grinding wheel and can have quite a bit more mass and take much longer to cool down.

Glad nobody got hurt.

Having a Hot Work Permit program to enforce outside of a pre-set "hot work area" (which could be the shop or part of the shop) can save lots of grief. It's a simple checklist, numerous examples you can use online. Basic questions, you can stop and rethink as you fill out the form.

-Is a fire extinguisher present?
-Do you have a person on hand to fire watch?
-Are all flammables removed from the area, and those that can't be wet down and/or covered with a fire blanket?
-Fire watch period after hot work is complete? (In my experience usually a half hour, although in more flammable environments an hour or more)
-Did a supervisor double check above?

It may seem excessive until you need it. As exampled in this situation- that wood that's been drying out for decades or is covered in grease and grime can go up before you can react.

This example below may be more in depth or strict than need be, but any iteration with the basic safety checks is better than nothing. Especially helpful for those who might not do hot work frequently- and even for those who do and can just as easily overlook or forget.



-Sam

A story... A group that shall remain nameless was faced with patching the lower body sheets on a heavyweight diner. Mindful of this they were grinding the rivet heads off with an angle grinder, then punching the remainder through with a punch. But, the grinding produced so much heat that the rivets were glowing dull red, and one of them dropped down the wall, where it started the horse hair insulation under the galley floor on fire. That resulted in a call to the local FD, who used their rescue saw to cut a hole in the metal galley floor plate to get at the fire. Luckily they were successful at extinguishing the fire before it spread any further. It's also lucky that the fire was evident, and didn't smoulder undetected until everyone left for the day.

Be careful.

We had a similar incident in a wood sided outside braced boxcar, rusty bolts were being cut off and a spark landed in a hidden spot on the wood floor. The work crew returned from a coffee break to find a small smouldering fire, which they quickly extinguished. But if it hadn't been caught right away it would have grown into a large fire and likely would have burned down our shop.

In addition to wetting down and cooling metal that is being cut, we avoid doing 'hot work' in and around wood cars after lunch.

I prefer using a sawzall whenever possible, while it does heat up the metal being cut it creates very few sparks.

This. The “crazy prepper” shows did no one any favors. What happened here was a great example of being ready, overcoming denial and reacting as trained, resulting in minimal harm done instead of something terrible or tragic.

Boilermaker did a nice service by posting the permit.

I was in a position of implementing them in a Steel Facility that never had used them before; first and foremost: it's a culture change that must be enforced.

Second: it's the "Revisiting" that's most important; I think ours was for several hours afterward.

Paul

Thanks Paul, yes revisting is invaluable. So is having multiple people double check for flammables being removed, or if not possible, wet down and covered with a fire resistant blanket, commonly just called welding blankets.

Recently at a job site, some hot work took place, the full hot work permit was filled out and double checked even by plant management. Five minutes in, the tank that was being repaired went up in flames- so quickly that by the time the pin was pulled on the fire extinguisher the flames had burned themselves forty feet up.

Four people had checked that area for flammables, and none of them had thought of the paper backing on the insulation around the tank. (Thankfully the insulation itself was not flamable) It seemed obvious in hindsight.... but sometimes you never know what you've overlooked.

Get a second or third pair of eyes on what you're about to do.... the things we work on just can't be replaced, and if any part of the artifact burns, the likelihood that you just lost something you needed to even make a replacement copy with is high, perhaps it's even irreplaceable altogether. The time it take for due diligence is a small one, and a hot work permit program is the bare minimum in much of industry. It's the least we could do to protect museum pieces.

-Sam

And in case anyone needs another reason to take another look at your hot work and fire-protection policies:



I don't have any information or knowledge of how it began, other than grease on the frame of an engine was smoldering, and after initial attempts at extinguishing failed, the fire department was called, and the unit was moved outside the building. This was all caught on one of the IRM's live camera feeds.

Alco/Ingersol Rand boxcab DL&W 3001.

An April 25, 2022 article on "Shaw Local News Network":
Railroad locomotive at Illinois Railway Museum catches fire Monday morning

An excerpt: