This is secondhand, just so you know; I was back in my office working on a gigantic stack of paperwork when the excitement happened.

So the aircraft are being cleaned down by the hanger, using rags from discarded clothing dating back years. When a rag gets too coated with old oil and grease, it gets tossed into a pile just off the back ramp of one of the birds. The pile grows. The sun beats down...

Spontaneous combustion! The rags reach their ignition temperature, probably that of the isopropyl alcohol. All the petroleum compounds join the fun, and it's a nice little blaze, right next to an aircraft.

Luckily there were people all over, so five different Marines grabbed hand-held fire extinguishers out of three different aircraft, and the blaze went down under a three streams of carbon dioxide, one of potassium bicarbonate, and one of Halon 1301.

My shop is responsible for all the firefighting gear, so I heard about this quite quickly, when Sgt L walked into my shop, nonchalantly said "These are empty," and strolled back out. Lacking an HH FB (as we normally call them) is a problem that will down an aircraft, and now we were short five of them! Good thing we're not doing any flying at all because of the cleaning project, so we've got plenty of time to replace them all.

And I was somewhere between amused and insulted when another maintainer mentioned to me that he was surprised that the fire extinguishers actually worked. I spend a lot of time inspecting those things, so they had damned well better work!

Posted by: Boviate at 09:58 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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