Speaking of ethanol, the July issue of Auto Body Repair News had an absorbing and alarming article about ethanol from a standpoint of putting out vehicle fires involving E-85 fuel. I'm sure most big city fire departments have a handle on this, or maybe not, but probably very few small town volunteer departments do.
A wake-up call occurred when a couple of tankers carrying ethanol were involved in accidents causing the ethanol to catch fire---and no one could put the fire out.
The problem is, ethanol is water soluble. Tests have shown that when E-85 is diluted 5 to 1 with water, it's still flammable. In other words, if you have a fire involving 1 gallon of ethanol and you spray it with 5 gallons of water, you've created an escalating fire containing six gallons of flammable liquid.
So, when a fire department is called to a vehicle fire, and they try to extinguish it with current water based retardents, they escalate the fire instead of retarding it. For openers, how do firemen know what a car is carrying for fuel? If it's E-85 certified, that doesn't mean it's carrying E-85. And you can't rule out the possibility of some dork putting E-85 into a non-E-85 vehicle.
The only sure way to know what a vehicle is carrying for fuel is to interview the last person to fuel it. And that person may now be trapped in a vehicle in a now escalating fire.
Besides being water soluble, ethanol also attacks the bubbles in the foam used on conventional fires, rendering the foam useless. There are new chemicals being developed that are effective against ethanol fires, but they are still in short supply and priced beyond your typical small town volunteer fire department.
The article in ABRN was written from the standpoint of body shops being alert to fire hazards caused by leaks caused gasket failure from people putting E-85 fuel in non-E-85 vehicles, but there is the same potential hazard wherever ethanol is present.
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