Electrical vault fires may not be common in your response area, but if one were to happen today, is your agency prepared to handle the emergency? What are the expectations of your local electrical utility? What is its response time? Is the response time longer at night? Is water the expected extinguishing agent? How confident are you that power has been secured prior to extinguishment? What’s your plan?
I asked myself and others at my station these and other questions when our department was enhancing our procedures regarding electrical emergencies. We quickly learned that there were several miscommunications that had been propagated over the years through the brutal “telephone game” of information passing through verbal report and the lack of a written policy and expected procedures when it came to vault fires and other electrical emergencies.
Ultimately, electrical vault fires are a low-frequency event, but they have the potential to be very dangerous. A vault fire can initially present with a minimal amount of smoke showing and rapidly evolve into a powerful explosion, followed by fire and thick black smoke exiting the vault. Electrocution is not the only hazard. Manholes can easily become heavy projectiles that can travel several hundred feet in a vault fire explosion. The products of combustion can travel through utility chaseways into the basements of adjacent buildings and into the next vault space down the street. These fires are not to be taken lightly. They can get away from you quickly.
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