Tank Storage Verbeke is a service provider for the chemical and petrochemical industry, from storage, transport, drumming and blending. The terminal is strategically located along important shipping routes
Tank Storage Verbeke is a service provider for the chemical and petrochemical industry, from storage, transport, drumming and blending. The terminal is strategically located along the main shipping routes of Antwerp and Brussels, and is also accessible by rail and highway.
In 2016, the site in Hemiksem was expanded with six new storage tanks. The tanks are located in a tank pit and are connected to the truck loading station and a jetty. There are two challenges that Tank Storage Verbeke had to deal with.
There was insufficient available extinguishing water flow rate for the fire extinguishing system of the new tank pit to enable the required flexibility. In addition, the own fire service had to activate the fire extinguishing system, which required the use of the fire service vehicle. The fire engine mixed the extinguishing foam concentrate with the extinguishing water. Connecting the hoses to the manifold of the foam extinguishing system took too long, making an incident such as a well fire catastrophic.
A foam mixer with a small supply of extinguishing foam concentrate has been installed in the manifold of the existing foam extinguishing system. In this way, the foam extinguishing system can be activated quickly and the tank pit can be foamed. The available amount of foam is sufficient to bridge the arrival and set-up time of the fire service. By using higher quality extinguishing foam, the desired flexibility can be achieved with a lower extinguishing water flow rate. In this way, both challenges were addressed.
We were also able to design the mixing installation on the fire engine for Tank Storage Verbeke together with our sister company Knowsley SK in Manchester. The customer wanted to be able to use the vehicle as widely as possible on the site. One of the challenges was the limited space on the vehicle. In collaboration with Knowsley SK we designed an installation and supplied a Midi and a Maxi Turbinator. This is a water-driven foam mixer that is able to accurately mix extinguishing foam concentrate with water. This means that the vehicle can be used in the most possible ways on the site of Tank Storage Verbeke.
The adjustments to the extinguishing foam system had to be verified. For this we carried out a test extinguishing in the presence of an inspection agency. During the test extinguishing, various tests were carried out. We have measured the actual extinguishing water capacity and checked the operation of the Turbinator: the mixing ratio of the extinguishing foam with the water. The results of all tests were good, making it a successful extinguishing test.