“It’s usually minor things, like forgetting to install a dust cap, that cause a detector to issue a false alarm,” explains Sven Brünjes, Head of the on-site fire brigade of the Dow Chemical Company in Stade, Germany. He is in discussion with Mike Bohl, Sales Director at Detectomat, who is describing the high levels of customer satisfaction achieved by Detectomat products. “This can happen during flexing, welding or shrinking cables, or sometimes even a few days later,” adds Uwe Köster, a project manager at CEE GmbH.

The employees of the on-site fire brigade undergo regular training led by Uwe Köster and his team. These sessions focus not just on operating the individual systems, but also on the overall set-up and structure of the fire alarm system.

PROJECT INFORMATION

Dow Chemical Company is one of the world’s chemical giants. At its plant in Stade, Germany, it mainly processes rock salt obtained from nearby salt mines, using electrolysis to obtain hydrogen, sodium hydroxide and chlorine. While some of the hydrogen and sodium hydroxide is then prepared and sold on, the chlorine is processed exclusively at this plant. Materials such as ethylene, propylene, methanol, acetate, phenol and aniline are also refined here at the Stade plant to obtain finished products.

ABOUT THE FIRE PROTECTION INSTALLED

At a site where dangerous materials are handled, safety is paramount – and this applies to fire protection too. With that in mind, it is no surprise that DOW has placed responsibility for all its fire alarm system technology in the capable hands of CEE GmbH since 1996. This firm of local specialists is a Detectomat premium partner. Since then, the focus has been on working in close collaboration with a producer of fire alarm system technology. Over time, the entire fire alarm system has been overhauled, stabilised and optimised. Together the partners have managed to reduce the false alarm rate by 50%. At the same time, more real fires are reliably detected by the fire alarm system. Fires that once would have led to a total production shutdown can now be extinguished in their very earliest phases.