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HALON 1211 Alternative Agents for Airport Fire Fighting Halon 1211 has been identified as a stratospheric ozone depleter. In 1988, the environmental community started tracking the large-scale ozone destruction and depletion connected with the use of chloroflourocarbon chemicals including Halon 1211. In 1992, as specified in the Montreal Protocols Clean Air Act, the United States Environmental Protection Agency developed a program to phase out the use of these chemicals in the United States. Its production was banned on January 1, 1994. The four classic extinguishing requirements for airport fire fighting streaming agents are; Ground Spilled Fuel Fires, Three Dimensional Inclined Plane Running Fuel Fires, Hydraulic Fluid Spilled Wheel/ Tire Fires, and the Three Dimensional Running Engine Nacelle Fuel Fire. The FAA has evaluated two candidate agents as alternatives to the complimentary agent Halon 1211: Halotron I and perfluorohexane. The objective was to evaluate these extinguishing agents in terms of extinguishment time and quantity of agent required. As a results of this testing, Halotron I was approved for use at FAA certificated airports as a complimentary extinguishing agent. The following four photographs show Haltron I being used in the four representative test scenarios. As can be seen by the photographs the agents are being tested at the upward limits of streaming agent effectiveness in an outdoor environment. See the pictures:
Contact Project Lead: Keith Bagot, ATO-P (formerly AAR-411) Last Update: 04/17/07 |
