Fire safety
Suspicious fire under the microscope FIRE FORENSICS HAS A REPUTATION AS A CAPABLE TEAM OF FIRE AND EXPLOSION INVESTIGATORS IN AUSTRALIA AND GLOBALLY, WITH A JOB AT A MAJOR COAL MINE IN MOZAMBIQUE OPENING A CAN OF WORMS THAT THE COMPANY WAS DETERMINED TO SOLVE.
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or more than 40 years, Fire Forensics has been known for its commitment to dissecting the causes of fires and creating thorough investigations to determine how and why a blaze occurred. While no investigation is a straightforward task, Fire Forensics managing director and senior investigator Belinda Jane (BJ) Jones was enlisted to examine a fire that had occurred on a Hitachi excavator at a major coal mine in Mozambique, Africa. Fire Forensics, which is based in Australia, was hired for the job due to the company’s previous track record working with the Australian expats hired by the
company operating the mine. The operator may have enlisted Fire Forensics for a fire that occurred on the excavator, but unlike most mine fires that are caused by machine or human error, Jones discovered that fuel theft had been involved. “This was a first for us,” Jones says. “It blew my mind that none of the other investigations looked at the refuelling systems.” Unlike Australia, Southern African mines do not have dedicated internal maintenance personnel, they use many sub-contracted companies which can lead to a conundrum of people trying to diagnose an issue or cover their
Fuel theft was found to be the cause of two excavator fires.
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tracks if responsible. “In Mozambique, it’s all contracted out. The local maintenance crew could touch everything except the engines, which were maintained by a separate sub-contractor,” Jones says. “We were dealing with 12 different people who can’t touch different parts (of the machine).” Fire Forensics was hired because a previous investigation could not uncover the cause of an excavator fire. “They had another investigator hired by the fire suppression system because it was an aftermarket system, as well as an investigator for the company which made the machine,” Jones says. “At the time, they had two reports that said different things and they weren’t happy with that.” While Fire Forensics was initially hired for a second single excavator fire, Jones was asked to analyse the previous excavator fire and two unrelated fires which had occurred on the site since. “Within half a day of arriving at the site I knew that someone had been stealing fuel from this second fire in the Hitachi excavator, since the fuel cap was off,” Jones says. “Because the refuelling systems are in such large tanks, they require high pressure guns to fill the tanks under super high pressure and safety mechanisms are installed in the refuelling system, including high pressure caps. “In the first instance, they decided to use very large shifters to get these highpressure caps off the top deck of the fuel tanks, to then remove the breather, which
