A Garbage Truck Bursts Into Flames – IOTW Report

A Garbage Truck Bursts Into Flames

Tuesday, 6 December 2022, 14:00 MJA Uncategorized 18

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18 Comments on A Garbage Truck Bursts Into Flames

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  7. yes, flaming garbage is funny, but it can be the worst kind of fire to put out.

    Two of the hardest to extinguish fires I ever had were in a dumpster and a garbage truck. In both cases, this was because the garbage is so compressed it is very difficult to get water into where the fire is once it gets good and going. There was a megachain grocery store that’s no longer in existence that had one of those dumpsters people throw things in all day, then press a button for the hydraulics to compress until you can’t do it any more, then someone comes with a truck with an empty roll-off dumpster and swaps it with yours. One of these caught fire and it wasn’t a big roaring fire but a really nasty smouldering type that filled the building with the foulest smoke you can image and you couldn’t touch it in that big steel box it was burning in as long as it was in place. Yes, dumpsters come with fire hose ports, but this wasn’t doing anything but flooding around the outside of the compressed heap of fire and causing toxic water to flood the frozen parking lot. We pulled the thing away from the building with the firetruck to get the smoke source out and so there wasn’t a possiblty it would flash into the building from the load end, then swung the giant door at the dump end open to get into it. Couldn’t even penetrate with 1 3/4″ lines on straight flow, which will rip the siding right off a house. We had to dig and drown, dig and drown, dig some MORE and drown because it was pretty full and pretty compressed. And keep in mind you have NO idea what kinds of things people put in there. A store of this nature sells food, oil, fertilizer, bug spray, mothballs, paint, car batteries, all kinds of things that may be under pressure and may be toxic as heck, although the store will tell you that of COURSE they don’t let their people put stuff in there, and you try to keep a straight face because you know “their people” just ignore the hell out of their bosses and do what they wanna do.

    A garbage truck is worse because it compresses AND it moves. It can have all the various things people put out to the curb like the dumpster and more, AND the truck also has fuel and its own hydraulic system full of flammable hydraulic fluid that, unlike the dumpster, isn’t just in the front and fairly easiy to disconnect from its resivour since the pump is in the building and it’s coulped with quick connects, but the garbage truck has hydraulics running from back to front for the door, the compression, and the dump component. The particular example I was treated to had burned through its hydraulics so nothing could be opened or dumped, and presented the same problems with compressed garbage.

    This one we had to damp down through the ports and whatever openings we could find, then follow the truck on a tow truck with escort to the dump where some very large equipment was used to lift and dump the thing like it was a Matchbox so we could finally put the mess out away from people that might not want a toxic, burnt-garbage smelling cloud floating through their house and depositing black sticky strands of whatever everywhere.

    And this was without the current backdrop of hyper environmentalism that doublessly means someone pitches a bitch kitty if you don’t block the storm drains.

    Garbage has very little value, but that doesn’t mean that it is simple to put out or that you can be cavalier about it. Trust me, even if there were no houses on the side that the truck exploded on and if God protected the driver from death in the explosion, there was some lucky fire crew that spent most of the day on that scene and went back to the house smelling like hot garbage that night no matter HOW much they turtled into their turnouts.

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  10. SNS DECEMBER 6, 2022 AT 3:04 PM

    Easy Peasy, some years ago…

    Had one locally and the driver dumped the load on the street like he was at a landfill and was then much easier to put out.

    Pain in the ass was getting the extinguished garbage back into the truck. And if memory serves, waited for the garbage company to bring a bobcat to load back into it. For some reason the driver didn’t want to try shoveling it all back in…

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  12. Anymouse
    DECEMBER 6, 2022 AT 5:09 PM

    “Had one locally and the driver dumped the load on the street like he was at a landfill and was then much easier to put out.”

    …like I said, we did that with the dumpster. Couldn’t with the truck because the hydraulics were burnt through.

    And shoveling garbage is definitely easier in your 20s.

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  13. SNS
    When our local bar caught fire there wasn’t anyway to get inside. Renovations over the years included a steel roof over the old asphalt roof. The old asphalt was probably 2″ thick. When we opened the back door there was 12″ balls of flaming asphalt dripping from the ceiling and the steel prevented attack from above.
    It’s a sinking feeling when all you can do is watch.

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  17. Cmn¢¢guy
    DECEMBER 6, 2022 AT 6:31 PM

    “It’s a sinking feeling when all you can do is watch.”

    …Surround and drown is unfortunate, but there are limits to what humans can do. Architectural quirks such as you had, fire load, how much it got ahead of you, resource constraints, life hazard considerations…lots of things can come into play that can cause structure loss. One does not throw away lives for buildings. The calculus gets adjusted if there’s a life at risk, but sometimes you get the poozer, and sometimes the poozer gets you.

    “It is possible to make no mistakes, and still lose.”

    …that may be a line from a Star Trek episode, but it has a lot of truth to it. I remember my first fatal fire, looking at all the trucks and ambulances and manpower and even a helicopter we had assembled as quickly as humanly possible, and feeling the futility that none of it mattered, he was dead despite all the men and machines we could throw into the fight against death. He was likely gone before the first tones dropped, but that did nothing to assuage my own sinking feeling that I could only spectate at another man’s death.

    Everything you do will fail.
    Everyone you love will die.

    Life is loss. Nothing is eternal this side of Heaven.

    Things like that remind us of that all the time.

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