torch vs saw experince

i agree with sawmilleg 100 percent , around my house or my little workshop i always try to keep a water hose handy when im cutting,,one of those old brass pump cans saved my trailor and truck once back when i was younger and dumber,,,i was burning something off an old jeep cherokee while it was loaded and chained to my car trailor...

in most of the plants i work in it is against the rules to attempt to extinguish a fire with water, unless you obtain special permission from the saftey office........any type of hot work at all requires a hot work permit....to obtain the permit the foreman has to coordinate with the saftey officer, his crew , anyone else in the nearby areas, and at least one regular plant worker...once the job has been surveyed out they decide how many fire watch workers will be needed and what equipment they will be issued in case of an accident...

most of the time they will give us 2 fire extinguishers and a couple 5 gallon buckets of some type of soda ash.. it is rare but some times we will be given a water hose and told to keep the area wetted down..this is very rare and is usually in chemical plants and not power houses...the biggest part of the time we are specifically told under no circumstance to use water...these plants contain various types of chemicals and even flammable metals, also electric lines are involved a lot of the times...

Two things came to me reading this thread: 1. We have all talked about how we separate our scrap. Place the yellow brass in a 5 gallon bucket, the #2 insulated wire in it's 5 gallon bucket etc. etc. The bucket we should maybe fill first, before cutting or grinding is the 5 gallon water bucket! Probably the fastest and easiest way to distinguish that small accidental "spark" fire. I'm talking about a fire should it get going past the smoldering "snuff out stage". A 5 gallon bucket of water is cheap, portable and easy to put a lot of water in one place fast. I'm sure most of us could fill it up faster than all of the other buckets we fill with the various scrap (especially the OMG it's GOLD one). 2. I have many years managing people and overall operations. Doing so I have had to deal with minor and major accidents/incidents. After dealing with the actual event, making sure the injured are treated, securing the area, the clean-up, and all of the many task needed after a major accident. The ones where people get hurt, property is damaged, and "normal" business is impacted. Who ever is in charge, has to determine how/why it happened. Their most important responsibility is coming up with answers/solutions to prevent and try to eliminate a repeat of similar accidents. Almost always there is three "facts" that repeat after a accident. Some of the preventable solutions were simple (as simple as a 5 bucket of water). There is always a chain of events, where one mishap leads to another, with each getting progressively more unsafe and less manageable. The third fact that is almost always present in evaluating and preventing accidents is COMPLACENCY. It's complacency, people (me too), we think we know what we are doing. We start taking risk, task for granted, utilize short cuts or "tricks". Complacency IMO is the most expensive word in the english language, it occurs when we stop listening, learning and thinking. Just my $.02 for what it's worth.