Episode 69 – Enhancing Safety: Fire Safety Survey

Welcome to the TRSA Podcast providing interviews and insights from the linen, uniform and facility services industry. Most Americans might not realize it, but they benefit at least once per week from the cleanliness and safety of laundered reusable linens and uniforms. towels, mats and other products provided by various businesses and organizations. TRSA represents the companies that supply, launder and maintain linens and uniforms, and in this podcast we will bring the thought leaders of the industry to you.

I’m your host, Jason Risley. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Linen, Uniform and Facility Services Podcast: Interviews and Insights by TRSA. Joining us to discuss the results of TRSA’s Fire Safety Survey is Charles Edelman, the corporate safety director at Unitex Healthcare Laundry Services in Elmsford, NY, and the chair of TRSA’s Safety Committee. Additionally, Johnny Sandras of Senico Rental Service in Cottondale, AL, discusses the impact that a devastating fire had on his business and the lessons learned from the experience.

So we’re going to be talking about fire risks at your laundry facility, whether you’re handling industrial uniforms or medical or food and beverage or hospitality, because the impact here is that all of our product is basically flammable. Some are at a risk alone from having so much cotton in it. Others because we deal with customers that use specific chemicals that might not necessarily be washed out thoroughly or can spontaneously combust, or easily combustible when they come over to our plants. TRSA sent out a survey asking everybody, all of the laundries that belong to TRSA, to give us some information. Give us some feedback on metrics on fires that you’ve had in your plant, you know some people don’t want to share that they had a fire. I don’t have a problem with that cause I think it’s a learning experience for everybody. But when you take a look at this out of the 24 locations, it’s almost split even that there are 11 fires that happened during work hours and 11 fires that happened after closure and that’s a very important point because after closure fire, those are the ones that can get away from you before you’re even aware of it. So some of the items that they were looking at, after they did their investigation, it was like, ‘So what did you find was the item that was burning when the fire happened?’ Well, 37% was bar mops and 20% was shop towels. And I’m going to add to that number, if you toss in, regular bath towels, whether you’re hospitality or medical, those are terry, high cotton. Towels are very easy to ignite. Mops. Dust mops, wet mops and dry mops are also an important critical item here. When we took another look at it, we came up with a chemical reaction or what we’re going to use the term spontaneous combustion and it’s about almost 2/3 of the fires were related to a chemical reaction. Some were a breach of procedure. We all have procedures in place, but when we talk about that we’re looking at are your maintenance teams monitoring the dryer controls? I don’t know to what extent everybody’s got in the dryer controls, but if you have a computer and they’re monitoring, what’s your programs and format? Those are like do you actually have a cool down cycle? Is your cool down cycle working? It’s very easy for a system whether manual or automated to make the mistake of not remembering if it has released that load of towels that it just dried and then restarts on the same program. You don’t want to cook towels twice. Or did somebody just say, well, I don’t think they’re dry enough and had too much time on the dryer to do another cycle on it and cook the cotton, terry. And that’s a procedural breach that sometimes just requires more training in the long run. When you’re taking a look at this. And we’re also looking at in the numbers we asked for what was the extent of damage. Did you just lose a dryer? Did you lose two dryers? Did you lose your ironing department or your clean side? Or the entire plant and we’ve had one that was a total catastrophe fire. And then we’ve had 20 that they all said were partials. What were the other three, I don’t really know. So when we take a look at it and you see the 2/3 of the dollars involved, were all under 60K. When you think about that, if you lose a dryer, even if you partially burn out a dryer, it could cost you 8. Twelve $20,000 to repair the dryer and you have to weigh that across the way you get to replace the dryer. And then when it comes down to your insurance card. What are you insured for overall? Because you have your deductible to meet, and if you have a significant deductible, OK, you’re not going to make the numbers in that less than 60K damage. That’s going to come off your bottom line. But as you go further, there are 10% approximately were between 650K and 1.5 million and the one that was a catastrophic was between 4 and 6.5 million, or a total loss of the facility. And you don’t wanna deal with that. You don’t wanna. You don’t wanna lose your facility over fire. So hopefully some of the information that we share today will be helpful. So what have we learned overall from these numbers? So we look at it and we say dryers definitely are critical to fire prevention. When you take a look at it, most have that giant burner either on the back, on the top, on the side depending on the model of your drive, natural-gas fed. High temperatures in there. When you look at your burner temperature, your burning temperature between 500° and 750° inside your dryer, you could be running between 150° and 200°. Of dryer temperature, that’s a significant number when you take into account that the hot and fiber itself starts to degrade when it crosses 205°F. What do I mean by that? It will support a fire once you get above 205°F. It still needs something.

A spark. It needs a flame to get it there, but considering most dryers are built with that flame that is easily reactive to what’s inside of a dryer. Watch your temperature. Your dryers usually have an upper limiter on them, maybe 207°, maybe 210° before they fault shut down an alarm critical that is maintained and your sensors are working. Everything is there. Awareness of the chemicals and the materials being dried. That’s another hot heavy hitter in there. Customers may not tell you everything that is on those shop towels or whatever items the mops that are coming over to us that you have to research and find out if those chemicals are highly reactive to temperature and flame, it could be very easy for them to ignite in the dryer. So it’s a matter of watching these items. Now we’re limited to that, of course not.

We had a a fire that was in March of last year and it was at a Long Beach facility when we tracked it down, it was mops. It was wet mops that overdried and and I think he was having trouble with a dryer. Possibly they just overheated over and it was during the night. It was after the close of business. The fire ignited in the hamper and it was underneath the gas line over the overhead heater. The fire rose, hit the heater and it broke the gas line and once that happened the fire went through the building. It went, ran straight through the gas line, went to the boiler, went to the hot water and went to the drives and it was a catastrophe. It was a 22,000-square-foot plant and we were producing about 100,000 lbs. of product, and we mostly do mats and bar towels and mops. I get a phone call at, you know, 10:00 at night from one of the plant guys, the plant production guy, said man look we got a bad fire. It was just devastating. You know, I’ve been through a lot. You know, I’ve been through a different fire, you know, little small fires. But when it happens like this, it’s just devastating. And the only thing I would would really suggest that people is, you know, we’re having trouble with the insurance companies still. And to verify your insurance policies, the main thing is, you know, you have loss of income and extra expenses, the extra expense that you really need to manage. We have litigation right now with the insurance company. You know, I’ve been through a tornado. Which leveled up an office with my server, then through a hurricane a fire is something that you could really prevent. You know you can’t prevent a hurricane. You can’t prevent a tornado, but with a little effort, a little weird fall, you could prevent fires and you know, we just didn’t do it properly and you know it just was devastating. You know, we had to wind up selling that location after 30 something years in business. You know, what happened when the fire hit it just was so hot with the gas and had an explosion. Our neighbor has one of these Ring cameras and you could see it when it exploded. When the fire hit the gas line, it just exploded. Yeah, it melted everything. It was so hot that the concrete either put your finger in the concrete and just peel a concrete up and. It was just unbelievable. We had the plant. Was there for 30 years. From what I understand now, this gas meter is that they put on buildings that when you get a rush of gas, it cuts off. You know, that’s something else. People should check with their gas, their utility companies, to see if they can update their meter to this newer version and that would have prevented the fire. And just, you know, when those things happen, you get that phone call and it’s a terrible phone call to get.

If you are a safety professional and want to learn more about best practices to prevent fires in your facility, visit TRSA’s On-Demand Learning Center at www.trsa.org and search for Enhancing Fire Safety in Commercial Laundries. Thanks again for tuning in, and if you liked what you heard on today’s show, please subscribe, rate and review us on Apple iTunes and Google Podcasts. For the latest news and information from the linen, uniform and facility services industry, subscribe to our newsletter, Textile Services Weekly, and our monthly print publication, Textile Services magazine. Additionally, don’t forget to follow TRSA’s LinkedIn account.