For those asking about why there isn't visible water being sprayed on the fire... There's no point. Any firefighting efforts are focused on preventing the spread of the fire to other structures (potentially other parts of the same structure)
As a rule of thumb, the water flow necessary to extinguish a burning structure is the volume of the structure (in feet) divided by 100. The resulting number is (in rough numbers) the amount of water you need, in gallons per minute. For a fire this size, you're looking at tens of thousands of gallons of water per minute. It's just not possible.
The other thing those people might consider, and this includes our president, is that they aren't firefighters, have no idea what to do, and surely live in a place unequal to Paris in any parameter upon which you'd care to compare. IT'S PARIS. They're in Paris. And to paraphrase Chevy Chase: You're not. They know what they're doing. Imagine you're the Paris fire chief. That's like being the NYC fire chief. Such a person has a distaste for explaining to superiors why they mismanaged a firefighting operation, and has a lifetime of experience, and hence, tends to manage it properly.
"Must act quickly!" Ya think? Hopefully the fire department in Paris, France is listening for gems like that from out here in the boonies / the ghetto hemisphere. How many medieval churches are there on our whole continent? Call us if you want a church bombed.
Shoot, you're probably right, and I fell for it. I guess the unintended consequence of my strict "ignore" policy over the last 3 years, is that I'm still a novice 3 years later. (Rarely do I see those brainfarts, but this one was unfortunately quoted in an article.)
It would be nice if there was somewhere to find high quality news reporting that avoided toxic stuff like tweets. I'm not sure what that embedded tweet adds to this BBC story besides getting people worked up over something that's totally unrelated. You'd think Notre Dame burning down would be enough.
Maybe a more optimistic interpretation is that people naturally want to try to help and would rather speak up than feel helpless even if their advice is not particularly good or useful.
It's complaining about a certain ignorant disrespect I've seen personally today, so I see it as corrective and therefore constructive. But I think I get what you're saying, though your comment is a little threadbare; I'd be interested in your full argument/reasoning.
EDIT: I added a few words to the grandparent post to try to make my intent clearer.
There was nothing disrespectful about Trump's tweet. I find it strange that you can't use his name, as if it's somehow shameful. That's disrespect to me.
I really wasn't monitoring my use of the name. Though obviously I am now. Anyway you guessed right: My lack of respect for the guy we're talking about is so deep and vast that this forum won't tolerate my going into it. And rightly so, because ultimately it's boring as heck.
Actually I think I was, if anything, charitably conferring tons of undue respect on that guy, by calling him "our president," thereby not only acknowledging his office but accepting him as "ours," both of which are more than some are willing to do. Ya can't please some people I guess.
Not enough people on the internet read what they're saying outloud before posting. I blame this on the low quality of discourse on the intnernet. You're very welcome by the way.
It was disrespectful because donald, the self-proclaimed expert on all the things, doesn't understand what he is suggesting, and doesn't understand that what he is suggesting is not helping anyone/anything except his ego.
I once had a neighbor whose house burned. From the outside it definitely looked like the fire crews were taking their time arriving, setting up camp, preparing, aiming, etc. But maybe acting intelligently isn't always the same as acting quickly.
I wonder how the firefighters feel about risking their lives for art, as opposed to other lives. I'm not saying I wouldn't risk human lives for certain works of art, but I can imagine some boots on the ground feeling salty about it.
I am a firefighter. Salvage operations are part of every fire (usually after the bulk of the fire is under control, but given sufficient manpower it also happens concurrently with fire attack operations).
They're not going to take huge risks. Any environment that would be extremely dangerous would be an area where any art has already been destroyed.
Swiss firefighters work on the four priorities of save lives, stop the fire, protect property from damage (including livestock), and protect the environment. Once lives and the spread of fire are under control, reducing the cost to the victims (emotional and financial) are why they are there.
Consider the Syrian archaeologist that hid artifacts from ISIL and refused to give them up. He gave his life and was tortured to death to preserve those artifacts [0].
How many human lives and human energy went into Notre Dame? How many lives would its continued existence inspire? Humans are far more temporary than art and culture. Art and culture connects us to the people that came before us.
Engaging in an activity with greater risk of killing you than usual is not the same as "giving one's life". These guys already fight fires for their day job. One more little bit of exposure to increased risk doesn't change the overall odds that much.
If a friend of yours called you and said "Hey, can you come pick up this painting I love before my house gets demolished?" would you drive over to pick it up?
Everyone in this thread is focused on whether or not the firefighters think the risk is worth it to save artwork. You're overlooking the fact that the sort of person who signs up to fight fires gets a rush out of being in a burning building in the first place. Saving the art is just a bonus...
But it’s not the whole story. If we had no connection to the past, it would feel like there’s no way to ever have a connection to the future, and thus it would feel pointless to do anything that is not entirely contained within your life time. Humanity would then become a very short term thinking species, and no great work or progress would ever be done.
While true, one should keep in mind that preservation is ultimately a futile endeavor. Nothing last forever. And yes, obviously that statement also applies to human life, but I'm certainly not going to judge anyone for refusing to endanger themselves for a painting.
PS: I had no idea it was so controversial to forgive people for not risking their lives for an inanimate object.
"Nothing lasts forever" is technically true, but I'm sure I don't need to point out how useless this statement is when it comes to making decisions. In situations like this fire, responders need to balance their own assessment of personal risk against the value of saving a given inanimate object.
Some people will categorically shy away from any perceived risk to their own safety, even if the estimated chance of saving a valuable object is very high. At the other extreme, some people would endure suffering and death to save what they recognize as priceless artifacts of history and culture.
I think many people interpret your comment as devaluing the choice that some people make to take such risks.
If your argument is that we shouldn't criticize people for choosing not risk their for inanimate objects, can you point to such criticism in this thread? I haven't seen any.
I can see how my comment could be read that way, because it's kinda what I'm saying. The parent comment heavily implies that preserving culture, via the physical existence of artistic works, is worth more than a human life because it is just oh-so-important. If you really think your life is worth sacrificing to save these artifacts, well, I disagree. What they represent doesn't go away just because they do.
Sure, if you don't care about art, or national pride, you might not get it.
Put it this way... would you run into a burning building to try to save the Declaration of Independence? (Assuming you're an American) Would most firefighters? Seems reasonable to me. The art inside the Notre Dame is on that level of importance, to France and to civilization itself.
isn't it just a piece of paper already scanned it very high quality? by burning it you are not really opposing any information value
no piece of paper/art and especially national pride is worth someone's health
I live in fourth most visited city in Europe and I couldn't care less if most touristy church burned down, it's just church, people are overly dramatic, most important it's nobody died and whatever will be outcome life will go on tomorrow and in two weeks nobody will remember about it in news
Most people would disagree with you. Many would act at risk of their own lives to save treasures that they feel are part of their national identity or human civilization.
Just because you don't feel that way doesn't mean they're all wrong.
I guess most of those people you describe are childless minority or people too young without children mumbling idealistic phrases
any sane parent would think twice risking his life over a THING. risking life to save other (strangers) lives it's questionable, risking life to save things it's just stupid
Push your logic a little farther. Any sane parent would think twice about risking their life for their child's life. Now push another direction... if you'd sacrifice your own life for your child, what about for someone else's child? A few years ago, I ran into the street in front of a moving car to try to save a child I didn't even know. I wouldn't have made it on time; luckily the car saw the child and slammed the brakes in time. But it's interesting to find just how deep one's own altruism will go. (Also interestingly, I did this in front of my spouse and our own children)
There's nothing unusual for being willing to die for a THING. Hell, people have sacrificed themselves in the millions for mere ideas. People fight to the death over tiny scraps of symbolic land.
It may seem stupid to you. It's stupid to me, too. But that's what people do. That's what people are.
millions also voted for trump, Hitler or believe earth it's flat, just because many people do stupid things doesn't make it good/rational, most of the society it's stupid/irrational, that's just fact (sadly democracy with equal voting rights it's best we came with), just because they are in majority doesn't make their acts right unless you identify with them, then good for you and feel free to ignore facts
as for saving someone's else child I would most likely not do it if I would calculate it's too risky for me (unless I would be stupid by instinct), if their own parent/guardian font care about their lives why should I? I don't expect other people saving my children. though it's not fair comparison,I am sure you have minute to decide if you save some piece of art work compared to split second decision to save living being
I also worked in past in insurance companies, after dealing with thousands of accidents my advice it's always run over animal, don't try to save it by avoiding it (unless it's boar or something similar comparable to concrete block/tree), try to fight your instinct, saw way too many dead people or in serious injury because they tried to save some stupid dog/fox etc and then crashed into some tree/building etc
There is always a continuum of risk. By your argument, anyone who traveled to go view a historic monument is "just stupid", since there is a non-zero risk that they will die in a car accident along the way.
If entering a burning building (which isn't actually _that_ risky) to salvage one-of-a-kind historic artifacts isn't something you would chose to do, that's fine. Don't label the actions of those that make a different choice "stupid".
The Declaration of Independence isn’t just a historical artifact; it’s an expression of ideas and beliefs that Americans have always fought and died for.
Notre Dame is...was...a medieval Roman Catholic cathedral in a postmodern secular country, desecrated rather than revered by the revolutionaries who built modern France.
I’m not claiming the French people don’t care about Notre Dame. I’m merely observing that the analogy to the Declaration of Independence is significantly flawed. Notre Dame embodied ideas that modern France has repudiated rather than upheld.
History and culture are very important to the French people. Our Lady of Paris is one of the cores of the city.
The country and government being secular does not mean that the people left their Catholic roots behind. Atheist and religious French people share similar values and the past is very important to both.
While 39% of the population of France is not religious, 51% of the population is Catholic (2016). Even as an atheist French-Canadian I am hurt by the loss of this monument. I can't even begin to imagine how it feels to religious Parisians.
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Edit: Someone on Reddit wrote a very interesting comment about its historical significance:
"Napoleon's coronation is incredibly recent in terms of Notre Dame's age. The amount of time between then and now represents less than 25% of the cathedral's existence.
It was built in 1163, one year after Genghis Khan's birth (or at least our best guess of his birth). Notre Dame predated Marco Polo and the founding of the Ottoman Empire by more than a century. It predates the creation of Islam. At the time of its construction, the best estimates for the global population are ~300 million (less than the current population of the United States). The cathedral was almost 200 years old when the Black Death destroyed a third of the world's population. The USA is currently younger than Notre Dame was when the Forbidden City was constructed in Beijing. It was 3 centuries old when Machu Picchu was built and Leonardo Da Vinci was born. It was over 400 years old when Shakespeare's Globe Theatre was built. It predated the original King James Version of the Bible by 450 years."
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Among other relics, a piece of the Crown of Thorns was inside the Cathedral. I don't have a hard time picturing someone braving a blaze to save that.
Identity is a complex construct, and it needs symbols like that. Even if as a symbol of Church it's no longer relevant, it is still at least a past achievement to be proud of.
And we are talking a building that has survived the French history, the Revolutionaries didn't destroy it, the Communards didn't destroy it (and the destruction in this event were quite extensive http://paris1900.lartnouveau.com/paris00/commune_destruction...). It's a testament of the culture importance of the building and the fact it far exceeds its religious function.
Disclaimer: French and living in Paris (I've not seen the fire however).
Nationalism, in current usage, tends to mean jingoism. The difference between that and patriotism could be described as the same as the difference between love and obsession.
Modern meanings of nationalism are synonymous with jingoism. It was once in the definition list on Wiktionary, but was conveniently removed late last year.
and if you follow that link, it refers to the 3rd definition of patriotism:
"The desire to compete with other nations; nationalism."
Patriotism is a better fit for this use, as there's the first definition:
"Love of one's country; devotion to the welfare of one's compatriots; passion which inspires one to serve one's country."
Generally, if we're not using literal dictionary definitions, in a political context, nationalism is overpowering patriotism where you want your country to be better than others at all costs. Patriotism is a love for you country and your people.
France does seem to have a deep seated nationalism that I don't understand very well. They care extremely deeply about their cultural works to a degree that does not make sense to me.
"The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does" [0]
That seems like a feel-good post-hoc euphemism (but ok, I accept that language evolves).
Either way: how did France (the nation) make any of these artworks? You could argue it was made by anyone in the spectrum ranging from "the artist" to "the humanity". Stopping at France seems arbitrary and a bit... nationalistic.
If any institution "made" them, it's the Catholic Church, not France.
Given that France is "overwhelmingly Roman Catholic" [0], your last statement could be considered interchangeable. Perhaps (and I'm not French, so I don't know) many of the people consider them to be one and the same. Either way, it's a reasonable point that you made.
Assuming you're American this is the most hilariously ironic comment I've ever seen on HN.
Americans are some of most obnoxiously nationalistic people I've ever encountered. Note: I've lived both in Paris, and also NY and California (14 years in the US). Only in the US do you hear mobs of nationalistic folk chanting "USA USA." I've never been in France or the UK and seen similar things. Think about things like Americans boycotting French Fries and calling them "Freedom Fries" when France decided not to join the illegal and immoral Iraq War.
There's an interesting attitude towards the word "nationalism" in US. As you say, it's probably one of the most enthusiastically civic nationalist nation in the world - indeed, to the point where American sociologists have described it as a "civic religion" at times. But the word "nationalism" itself is almost exclusively interpreted as "ethnic nationalism", and has an unambiguously negative vibe. So people who practice civic nationalism describe themselves as "patriots" instead.
My favorite part of the "USA! USA!" chant is how seriously non-Americans are about it. Every time I've started or participated in a "USA! USA!" chant it was only about 15% nationalism and 85% a joke. Part of its enchanting humor is how that seems lost on everybody else.
I can imagine that too. I can also imagine the cathedral being so iconic that a sense of national pride might take over to try to salvage anything possible.
You've been posting a whole lot of unsubstantive comments recently. Could you please review the guidelines and stop? We ban accounts that won't post civilly and thoughtfully.
One would think that they had a plan in place and some key pieces already scheduled to be saved in case of a fire. They probably stopped that operation once the fire spread to the totality of the structure. For a while, it was only in the roof since it started from the attic.
I wouldn't think that any individual firefighters are being commanded to do it against their will. It's not the same as going into a burning building to save lives.
It's unlikely an urban fire department is set up for any significant amount of drafting (pulling water from surface sources), if it's something they can do at all.
You're absolutely right though, if you want big water, that's the way to get it. It's just that "big water" doesn't even begin to approach the scale of the water that would be necessary to directly fight this fire.
It's unlikely an urban fire department is set up for any significant amount of drafting (pulling water from surface sources), if it's something they can do at all.
SFFD trucks have that capability, and it was used in the 1989 earthquake. It's intended for pulling water from the underground cisterns marked by a big ring of bricks in SF intersections.
Terrible for the equipment to run salt water, but they had to.
I thought SFFD was some brand used by the French, but of course it's just USA-centric naming. (Took me forever to understand BART and I still have to look up name-based time zones like MST, which, no, thanks Wikipedia, is not Malaysia Standard Time at +8 but Mountain time at -7.)
For anyone else confused: this earthquake was in San Francisco and this is about their Fire Department. It doesn't mean that French fire trucks have that capability 30 years later.
It's unlikely an urban fire department is set up for any significant amount of drafting (pulling water from surface sources), if it's something they can do at all.
My understanding, which is probably quite out of date, is that it's mostly harbor firefighting boats which had this ability.
A coworker of mine points out that many of the San Francisco manholes are actually covers for cisterns of water, which exist primarily for fighting fires after an earthquake possibly takes out the water mains and starts many fires. I should hope that San Francisco fire trucks can draft water to use these.
Park the truck next to the cistern. Connect a length of hose to the pump supply, drop the hose into the cistern. The pump will move water until it loses suction pressure.
Is the hose to be dropped into the cistern different from the other hoses? I would expect it to be reinforced, such that it wouldn't collapse from air pressure. Hoses downstream from a high pressure pump wouldn't need such reinforcement. However, it's different upstream from such pumps.
You can recognize the cisterns because there are big (like 20 ft in diameter) brick circles inlaid into the street in SF to mark the cisterns. Neat once you know what to look for
> It's unlikely an urban fire department is set up for any significant amount of drafting (pulling water from surface sources), if it's something they can do at all.
London Fire Brigade for example has nine special pumps that can draw 2000 gallons a minute each from river or lake supplies. So that's 18,000 gallons a minute just from them.
Yeah, but that's not "a significant amount". It's certainly less than half of what you would need to fight this fire head on. That's also assuming all those engines are in-service, staffed, and can get there and get set up within a reasonable amount of time.
I would expect the fire department of a large city with navigable waterways to have fireboats, though, which by their very nature draft water. Even if the boat's own nozzles don't reach. they can generally be used as pumps for hoses on shore.
The devil is in the details. A "short" distance on a "small" island might well amount to a huge amount of hose. Then there's the logistics of getting all of that in place and hooked up. The trucks on site would need to pump to increase the pressure to usable levels, and all of that would have to be compatible. Getting enough trucks onsite might be a logistical challenge just in itself.
The real world is complex. It's not all like software or taking multiple choice exams. Again the devil is in the details. Pay really close attention to the map legend. It looks like there's nearly 200 feet of distance from the closest water shown on that map and the nearest side of the cathedral. I really doubt that all fire trucks carry 200 feet of hard suction hose, or have pumps designed to draft through 200 feet of hard hose.
"The NFPA 1901, Standard for Automotive Fire Apparatus – Requires pumpers to carry:
15 feet of large soft sleeve hose or 20 feet of hard suction hose"
You would never try to draft through 200 feet of hard suction. In fact, I'm relatively sure it would be impossible, since no matter how well you tighten the connections, there's pretty much always going to be a minute amount of vacuum loss at each coupling. In practice, few fire departments ever draft though more than 20 feet (2 sections) of hard suction, and even then it can be a challenge getting the pump primed, depending on any elevation difference between the water surface and the engine location, etc.
In real life, if you were going to draft in an environment like this, (leaving aside any reference to fire boats for a moment), you'd drive an engine to within 20' or so of the water, have it draft, and then relay water to the fire scene using (usually) 5" LDH. But sometimes even getting an engine to within 20' of the water can be a challenge, based on the geography and circumstances.
If the body of water you're drafting from is (strongly) subject to tides, that adds another complicating factor as your water source is now moving around, which could require constant re-positioning of the apparatus.
Lay people always see fires near large bodies of water and think "Why is water supply a problem, they're surrounded by water?!?" But it's often more complicated than that.
Source: was a firefighter and firefighting instructor for about a decade in a former life.
Also, even if you had a pump by the river, hand-jacking that length of LDH requires a huge amount of physical effort, and would tie up a lot of manpower during a critical phase of the operation.
I don't have to pay close attention to the map. I've been there. It is absolutely close enough to the river to have hoses running directly from it. The fact that they didn't use it suggests it probably wasn't such a good idea, we are only dudes writing on the internet, they are firefighters with experience doing their job.
I wasn't able to find any hard sources, but I don't see any evidence that the Paris Fire Brigade has any boats with any significant pumping capacity. Most of their boats seem to be rescue/dive focused, with small master stream deck guns.
Yeah, I've seen at least two draft lines running. But at best that's going to be 3-4k GPM. Enough for a couple of those big water streams. You'd need >10x that to fight a fire like this head on (which they clearly didn't have, since they immediately went to salvage and exposure protection measures)
The Seine is not directly beside Notre Dame. It’s a steep drop and 200-300ft away depending on angles. A standard fire hose is 50ft. A supply/relay hose is typically 100ft. They can’t just hook up a few hoses, dunk them in the Seine, and then instantly put the fire out.
There were notable logistical issues to get enough firefighters on-site given it’s an island, and there were a ton of people around when the fire broke out. They wound up having 400 firefighters on-site until midnight to get it under control and save the structure. I’m pretty confident they did all they could, and HN’s armchair firefighters aren’t likely to have done any better.
The equipment used to pull from a hydrant is substantially different to the equipment used to draft (suction) surface water. Consider, for instance, that hydrants are under pressure.
The big difference is that you need rigid tubing, colloquially known as "hard suction" hose to draft from a static source. Typically soft-walled hose would collapse if you applied suction to it. At least in the US, most engines carry hard suction tubing, but I believe some urban engines may forgo it, opting to use that space for something they use more often. And even if they do have it, the engineers may not have a lot of experience setting up a drafting operation.
Would only work until the engine is empty, then you have to hold up using the local hydrants (which will likely not be able to supply six fire engines going full throttle)
First, it's the temperature. A fire is extinguished in the first minutes; after a few hours, you can do nothing but contain it. It's the problem with roof fires: they burn for a long time without being seen, and are therefore powerful when visible.
The aerial tankers are at Nimes. Helicoptors are a little closer, but more in the south. If you use one or the other, it would take several hours.. After the detection of the fire, by which time it has grown in power.
Specific complication today: the discovery was at the end of the afternoon. The planes can't operate in night (experimentation is ongouging), especially in an environment as complex as Paris. Even if we send them, they couldn't intervene until tomorrow.
Second point: access. A roof, it's waterproof. An aerial tanker would douse the tiles or copper cover, but not a drop would arrive on the file except at the stage where the roof has already began to fall. Then, the plane could douse the flames. But it's much, much too late: by the time the first tiles fell, the carpentry would already be gravely weak. In fact, these fires only become visible when the damage is already profound.
Sending the aerial tankers over a building, that's already done. But for exterior fires. Under a roof, that isn't useful until the roof has already fallen. That's why these planes don't service this kind of fire. In fact, at the moment where one can still save the roof, these fires are only accessible by the interior.
That's the difficulty with the work of firefighting. If they could, they would love to intervene without plunging into the flames... But while it burns under a roof, it's necessary to go find the fire.
Correction after several reactions: when I speak of aircraft without precision, I think especially of helicopters. Canadair is clearly excluded by effect of its backwash, which can provoke a collapse of the carpentry, already severely weakened.
Short of a very precise aerial tanker mission (and how long would it take to spin that up or get lucky with an aircraft in training nearby, fill up and then vector it), no way to put it out. It might've been feasible as there are very few tall buildings or structures in Paris and it's in the middle of the river with nothing much on either side.
People also should know that simultaneous fires on multiple floors of multi-story buildings typically aren't possible to fight either, reducing possible efforts to containment and damage mitigation.
I don't get all the hype about tankers... A tanker load would do significant structural damage to the building, would be a huge risk in city with a lot of tall structures, would be totally ineffective on the bulk of the fire (that's below the roof), and would require pulling out all the firefighters on the scene, significantly reducing the overall firefighting capacity.
This is basically what the chief of the Paris fire brigade told the news (dumping a load of water on the building would finish destroying it). Add to that the fact that the closest Canadairs are 600 miles away and designed to draw water from the sea.
It seems like the weight of amount of water/retardant to effectively extinguish a fully-involved fire would be a problem AND simultaneously smothering the fire underneath AND reducing core coal temperatures below ignition point would need to happen. It's a thought towards a possible solution to a ruinous class of fires, but there appears to be a need for a gentle and widely-deployed technology to rescue historic structures in the midst of fire events.
1. Cool an outer structure rapidly with lightweight/gently-applied, inert, high specific heat material from above.
2. Thixotropic gently-applied, inert, high specific heat material inner structure (possibly same as 1.).
> For those asking about why there isn't visible water being sprayed on the fire... There's no point. Any firefighting efforts are focused on preventing the spread of the fire to other structures (potentially other parts of the same structure)
> As a rule of thumb, the water flow necessary to extinguish a burning structure is the volume of the structure (in feet) divided by 100. The resulting number is (in rough numbers) the amount of water you need, in gallons per minute. For a fire this size, you're looking at tens of thousands of gallons of water per minute. It's just not possible.
I wonder if the fire could be covered with a huge tarpaulin or alike to try to suppress it.
In these sentences, you're using "hot" and "cool" to refer to temperature, and using "thermal load" to describe what physicists and engineers unambiguously call "heat," as in the amount of thermal energy held within a specific object of a certain mass, heat capacity, and temperature. In my admittedly limited experience with thermodynamics (currently in grad school for physics), "thermal load" seems to describe the exact same thing as heat, except it's less common. In fact, it initially confused me because of the concept of "thermal mass," which refers to the total heat capacity of a given object = mass * (heat capacity per unit mass).
Any thoughts on why there isn't more evident action from building fire suppression systems? At least in smaller systems, I've seen sprinklers that work externally to the building to protect tall wooden spires, etc.
If there was fire suppression in the building, it likely didn't cover the construction scaffolding, and once that got burning, it was certainly hot enough to overwhelm any sprinklers.
There are four major phases in the life of a fire, incipient, growth, fully developed, and decay. Sprinklers are designed to keep a fire from progressing from incipient to growth. Once it makes that transition, the battle is lost.
I suppose that if it were possible, it would be very heavy, and could break the very structures it tried to preserve.
I wonder if injecting large amounts of CO2 or N2 inside the structure would be feasible.
Water-soluble foam, which is much lighter weight and easier to produce in large volumes, is also known to be used to contain large fires, especially of oil / fuel.
Yeah, now that the fire is progressing into the "decay" phase (as it has burned through most of its fuel) there is less risk of spread to other exposures, so it makes sense to start shifting fire streams towards areas of active fire.
Based on some of the other commentators, tens of thousands of gallons per minute sounds doable. One mentioned a single truck can do two. Get ten or more of those trucks (which I assume Paris has) and that seems like a decent amount of water.
By "tens of thousands" I meant more on the order of 60k+.
Getting 10 engines there wouldn't be the issue. Supplying them with water would be. Given that it's an island, they would be limited to the capacity of the water main serving the island.
A reasonable person might think that it did occur to emergency fire services to respond quickly, particularly in a nation and city with a great history in the field.
A reasonable person might also think that the man put in charge of the largest nuclear stockpile in the world, that could literally end the world, would have already considered that and knew air tankers were the most viable option, so long as they acted fast after his communication.
“Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I’m one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you’re a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are — nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what’s going to happen and he was right, who would have thought? — but when you look at what’s going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it’s all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don’t, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.”
According to a response paraphrased from Le Monde, the problem is that the water pressure by an aerial tanker could well destroy what is trying to be saved.
If you start using tankers, you have to evacuate everyone from the area (in a larger area than their current evacuation cordon). It would mean all other on-site firefighting operations would have to stop.
Using aerial tankers would be unsafe (flying planes are very low altitudes through a city), and would result in a net reduction in firefighting efforts on scene.
Fire retardant might work, but is likely not readily on hand in an urban environment (and is really meant to prevent spread of fire, not to put a fire out).
Dumping actual water would be a bad idea both for the people and the structure, simply because dumping heavy things from high places is generally dangerous.
Yes. Potentially far, far worse. And people have absolutely died from using fire retardant delivered from air tankers.
These planes have to fly extremely close to the ground to deliver their payload (which is spread over an area far too large to be effective in this case anyway btw) and too often the plane can lose control, whether from sudden unweighting or the turbulence from the fire and crash. This can kill everyone on board and usually starts a new fire to boot.
Donald trump just picks an idea that will sound like "common sense" to a lot of people. It makes sense in a simplistic kind of way, but is fundamentally flawed. But people get to feel angry that their ideas are not being taken seriously. And that the world is being ruined by stupid liberals who won't do the obvious thing. As if a fire chief in Paris has a duty to try out bad ideas just to protect the feelings of a random Twitter handle and his followers.
Airtankers, waterbombers, and air attack are all common terms used to refer to aerial firefighting. I can't imagine this is something unique to North America but both the United States and Canada employ planes and helicopters to drop water and fire retardants on forest fires in remote areas where conventional firefighting equipment cannot reach.
We also have a form of firefighter called a Smoke Jumper that's the equivalent of a Paratrooper for fighting fires. They're deployed in these remote areas to clear out areas ahead of fires to constrict or redirect fires.
""Truly weird Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky reminds me of a spoiled brat without a properly functioning brain. He was terrible at DEBATE!"" & another:
"".@FrankLuntz is a low class slob who came to my office looking for consulting work and I had zero interest. Now he picks anti-Trump panels!"" - who do you think vetted these? Which professionals?
The obvious and sad truth is; Trump watches TV, and randomly reacts real time on twitter with his own words. You can figure out what he is working (and NOT working on) by simply looking at what TV shows, channels, and people-on-TV he refers to as he continues to tweet throughout the day.
As a rule of thumb, the water flow necessary to extinguish a burning structure is the volume of the structure (in feet) divided by 100. The resulting number is (in rough numbers) the amount of water you need, in gallons per minute. For a fire this size, you're looking at tens of thousands of gallons of water per minute. It's just not possible.