Every year in the UK more than 93,000 cars go up in flames, equating to nearly 250 a day. Currently, up to three fire engines, complete with crews, are deployed to tackle a fire, and often it can take as many as 1,800 litres of water and up to an hour to put it out.
Regularly, firefighters need to deploy foam to extinguish the flames, which is harmful to the environment and requires prior permission from the Environmental Agency for the firefighters to use.
Apart from the immediate risk on life, safety and personal property, the average cost to the taxpayer for resurfacing a road after a car fire is £15,000. If it’s a major fire, this will also cost the economy around £1.5 million per incident if three lanes are closed for four hours.
So why does a car fire take so long to put out? The first reason is that modern cars are made up of a number of different combustible materials and fuels, which means that multiple different classes of fire are occurring within one blaze. Current traditional firefighting methods are not able to quickly tackle all of these classes of fire at once though.
The second reason is time. A car fire can reach temperatures of up to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit in just 11 minutes, which is the average time it takes for a fire crew to respond to a callout. Water, the main tool in the fire brigade’s arsenal, works by ‘stealing’ the heat from a fire, making it unable to burn the car ‘fuel’. It takes a long time for water to do this however, when the fire is so hot to begin with.
How can Firexo help? As the only solution to combat all classes of fire (A, B, C, D, E & F), Firexo can put out car fires containing electrical, fuel, gas, oil, fat, metals, and solid combustible materials, fast.
Firexo works to remove both the oxygen and the heat from a fire, meaning it requires less volume. In one test, nine litres of Firexo put out a car fire in just 53 seconds. A rapid-response motorcycle could therefore hold enough of the liquid to put out up to three cars.
Firexo is also biodegradable and cools materials to a temperature that they can be handled, enabling a vehicle to be recovered quicker. This in turn reduces the disruption to other road users and the impact on the surrounding environment. This makes Firexo Mass perfectly suited for use by fire crews to put out vehicle fires quickly and helping an incident have as little impact as possible. In testing, nine litres of Firexo Mass put out a car fire in just 53 seconds.
But Firexo is not just for use by professional firefighters. What if every motorist carried Firexo’s Spray Can in their glove box or Firexo’s 2ltr extinguisher under their seat? Small fires could be caught early on and, in some cases, emergency services wouldn’t even have to be called.
Armed with the knowledge that Firexo works on all classes of fires and requires smaller volumes than water, motorists would be empowered to act to contain small fires. Fires tackled quickly by the driver may only result in their vehicle having to be recovered by a breakdown service, rather than losing the entire vehicle to fire.
Modern cars are incorporating more and more technology to safeguard us such as emergency brake assist, autonomous cruise control, and lane departure warning systems. Volvo, has even publicly stated its vision that by 2020 no one should be killed or seriously injured in a new Volvo car. Yet the UK’s motorists are still woefully unprepared for fire. Our vehicles are not required by law to have any form of fire safety equipment in them, and most don’t.
It’s time for change. Simply carrying an effective fire solution should be something all drivers do. And by making sure it’s a Firexo extinguisher, you can be confident that you’ve made the right choice.
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