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> 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 spr
by Faint 7y ago
> 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.
- leetrout 7y agoThe thermal load of the hot wood would burn it even if it extinguished the visible flames unless you could cut off all oxygen flow.
- JshWright 7y agoSounds like a great way to make the world's biggest backdraft...
- EForEndeavour 7y agoIs "thermal load" in this sentence an elaborate term for "heat", or is there more nuance that I'm missing?
- Maxion 7y agoYou can have a tiny amount of material be very hot, but you could cool it with a small amount of water. Its thermal load is low. If you have a large amount of material be moderately hot, you'd need a lot of water to cool it. The thermal load is high.
- EForEndeavour 7y agoIn 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).