Charge the hose! Extinguishing quickly and safely in an emergency
Fire protection is a top priority when handling around one million litres of combustibles and fuels every day. At Landi’s Landquart tank facility, regulated ball sector valves ensure a fire is quickly extinguished and does not result in the water main bursting.
Trading in liquid combustibles and fuels is a key area of business for AGROLA. The Landquart tank facility is a distribution hub. Petrol, heating oil and diesel arrive here in block trains of 20 tank wagons. It’s then stored away in storage tanks and loaded into fuel tankers. These ensure the filling stations and heating systems in the Canton of Graubünden and neighbouring regions never run out of fuel.
Extensive modernisation of tank facility
Over the last few years, as part of a full rebuild of the Landi site in Landquart, the tank facility has also been fully modernised in a number of stages. Key areas of work were air monitoring and fire protection, two particularly sensitive areas in which strict official requirements need to be met. Both the petrol vapour recovery system and the fire extinguishing system had to be replaced. Landi Graubünden commissioned the engineering company Basler & Hofmann to plan the two projects.
Basler & Hofmann is one Switzerland’s leading engineering and planning companies. It has an outstanding reputation among private and public sector clients both in Switzerland and abroad. The company is known for its high level of technical expertise in various fields and for continuity of personnel.
Local mains water supply used for firefighting
After Basler & Hofmann had planned the replacement of the petrol vapour recovery system in Landquart, the company tackled the renewal of the stationary fire protection installation. The challenge with this project proved to be the drawing of water for firefighting from the Landquart local mains water supply in the event of a fire. Project manager Robert Widmer: «The pipes in the local mains water system are all different ages and are not all in an equally good condition. When firefighting, up to 10,000 litres of water are drawn off per minute. If the flow were to be stopped abruptly, burst pipes would be unavoidable. We would then perhaps have an extinguished fire, but also a burst water main, enormous water damage, and an extinguishing system that would not be fit for use over the long term.»
This risk meant that the focus became the valve issue. Robert Widmer: «We needed control valves with equal-percentage control characteristics which could be opened and closed slowly to avoid dangerous pressure surges in the pipeline network. It also had to be a totally reliable product that would function seamlessly despite contamination, such as sand particles in the water. It had to have a long service life and require little maintenance.»
On the safe side with the ball sector valve from Schubert & Salzer Control Systems
Electric actuators from AUMA allowed Bachofen to meet the need for electrically controlled regulating valves using Profibus DP, with some ATEX-compliant versions. In combination with the uniquely designed ball sector valve from Schubert & Salzer, Bachofen developed a customised valve which – as a key element – fully meets the high demands of this application.
Excellent collaboration over many years, as well as consultation on an equal footing, meant that a range of potential solutions could be discussed openly. This approach, together with Basler & Hofmann’s extensive experience with stationary fire protection in large tank facilities, meant that this technically effective solution was arrived at. The result is that the operator of the Landquart tank facility can now rest easy for at least two decades.