During the Cold War, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps installed the Automatic Fire Extinguisher System (AFES) in their frontline combat vehicles to protect crews. Pressurized to 900 psi, the extinguishers were designed to flood a crew compartment with fire-suppressing chemicals in milliseconds, mitigating the damage caused by explosions caused by incoming munitions penetrating onboard fuel sources.
Maintenance personnel working on the Abrams main battle tank and Bradley fighting vehicle were trained in how to handle the highly pressurized high rate discharge extinguishers so that no inadvertent injuries occurred. This training included the strict use of safety features, most notably an anti-recoil plug and safety pin.
Then the Cold War ended, and the U.S. military shifted to conducting counter-insurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The well-defined front lines of Cold War days disappeared, to be replaced by a warfighting environment in which any in-country vehicle might be subject to attack from improvised explosive devices. Infantry combat vehicles, Humvees and other trucks were up-armored by the thousands. In the process, the number of vehicles equipped with automatic fire extinguishing systems increased tenfold.
Unfortunately, the training of maintenance crews for safe handling of those systems did not expand at a similar rate. So now the military is living with a problem nobody anticipated during the early days of the global war on terror. Maintainers are dying or being severely injured by equipment intended to protect warfighters. Because they have not been trained to safely handle the many thousands of highly pressurized fire extinguishers in vehicles or depot warehouses, there is an increased risk of injury due to improperly handling an AFES extinguisher without observing safety precautions.
In one recent incident at Camp Pendleton, a civilian worker was killed when he dropped the 25-pound extinguisher, and the pressurized agent inside was rapidly discharged -- turning the bottle into a high-speed projectile. The bottle had not been properly made safe with the anti-recoil plug to prevent such an accident. These accidents are becoming more common, even though the procedures for installing the safety features or bleeding off the pressurized agent are not particularly difficult. Untrained workers at depots and logistics sites just aren't aware of them.
This problem is analogous to the improper handling of oxygen generators by maintainers supporting a ValueJet flight originating at Miami International Airport in 1996. Workers thought the expired oxygen generators posed no danger and loaded them into the cargo hold of the airliner for transport to another location. Some of the generators were still pressurized, and when one or more was triggered in flight, the resulting heat caused a fire that was fed by the escaping oxygen. The plane crashed, and everyone on board died.
Like the automatic fire extinguishers in combat vehicles, the oxygen generators that brought down ValueJet Flight 592 in the Everglades were designed to protect passengers in an emergency. Because of inadequate training and poor communication, a system conceived to save people instead ended up killing them. The airline industry learned from the accident and instituted procedures to avoid a repetition. The military has not moved with similar dispatch to address the problem of improperly handled fire extinguishers.
United Technologies Aerospace Systems’ Kidde business, the maker of the majority of the military’s existing AFES fire extinguishers, has devised a simple mechanical upgrade for the problem that can be retrofitted to replace all existing AFES extinguishers. It changes the design of the discharge valve on extinguishers so that pressure is safely released in the event of an inadvertent discharge, without requiring a special step by whoever is handling the item. This solution does not impact fire suppression performance but makes the fire extinguisher intrinsically safe even when dropped without the safety features installed.
The legacy systems can be replaced with new, safer systems in the normal course of sustainment or by retrofit. Once the improved design is installed, maintainers at depots and at field locations can worry less about the danger of the extinguishers they are handling becoming lethal projectiles if they are improperly handled.
The new bottles are almost indistinguishable from the old ones, so this really is a simple modification. But to implement it, production lines need to switch over to the new design and the legacy bottles need to be removed from thousands of vehicles in the military fleet. There also needs to be some established procedure for safely getting rid of all the legacy extinguishers stored at scores of military locations. Some of these stores have not been adequately secured because managers do not grasp the potential danger they pose.
A modest legislative exertion by Congress would be sufficient to get this threat to warfighters and maintainers removed from the joint force. It is not a huge problem in the total scheme of military challenges, but lives are being lost or permanently altered by a danger for which an easy upgrade is readily available.
Loren Thompson is chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute and taught nuclear strategy at Georgetown University.