This is an odd ball report. It doesn't fit.
3 injured in ‘routine’ Trump Tower fire, New York officials sayhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pos ... b015fe17d4Quote:
“The fire wasn’t in the building, it was on top of the building,” the fire department said on Twitter. “We had flames coming out of the vents, no smoke condition or fire was on the inside.”
Fire officials said they received an emergency call just before 7 a.m. About 75 minutes later, the fire department tweeted an alert, saying the fire, which was located inside a cooling tower, was “under control.”
“There was a small electrical fire in a cooling tower on the roof of Trump Tower,” the Trump Organization said in an emailed statement to The Washington Post.
There's a 46 second video at the top of the story. The amount of smoke billowing looked like what would come from a ‘routine’ house fire. Not what would come from a cooling tower. This doesn't fit.
I've installed cooling towers on top of buildings of that size and have maintained them. There is very little to burn, they're made of steel, and filled with water, there's a poly plastic thing at the top the water is sprayed on which we call an egg crate. it's usually too moss and alga covered to burn. There's a big PVC pipe with big sprinkler heads in there.
Other than that it's a steel thing in a steel clad surrounding with two electric motors. A building that size would have about a 50 HP blower motor, and a 10 to 15 HP water pump motor. There might be an additional 10 to 15 HP water pump motor as well. And start gear to make then all go, and fuses to blow. Sure a motor starter or motor could burnout and smoke a bit for a few minutes, but it wouldn't be all of them burning and the amount of smoke they would expel wouldn't look like a house on fire. The burning and smoke they released would be over before a fire department with street full of engines and news crew would arrive. And that's what I saw on that video.
Something other than a cooling tower was on fire there.
A cooling tower will often billow off a lot of white steam in the early morning when the day begins and someone seeing it will call a fire department, but those aren't fires. The cloud is white and it dissipates a few yards away. It's not brown and being blown for a coupe of blocks like what I saw happening in the video.
There have been a lot of times fire departments have been called to buildings in the early morning over ‘routine’ cooling tower operation. And sometimes they do get in the news. Perhaps that is where the seed for calling this a cooling tower fire came from, it sounds ‘routine’.
Something burned and someone doesn't want to talk about it.