Today’s Safety Saturday subject is A Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion or BLEVE (pronounced BLEV-ee) can occur when fire heats and weakens the walls of a storage tank, particularly in the region above the stored liquid where cooling is less effective. In August 1959 the Kansas City Fire Department was hit with their largest loss of in the line of duty deaths to date, when a 25,000 gallon gas tank exploded during a fire on Southwest Boulevard killing five firefighters. This was the first time BLEVE (Boiling Liquid Evaporating Vapor Explosion) was used to describe a burning fuel tank. This video (https://youtube/watch?v=hZ5nEJbhFEY) shows firemen in Kansas City, Kansas, in a desperate 6-hour battle with a raging gasoline fire that starts at a bulk service station, and touches off huge storage tanks, sending flames hundreds of feet in the air and rocking the city. Get past the vintage and look at them from the perspective of, “could this still happen to us [emergency responders] today”.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 13:00:00 +0000
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