What are the major causes of fires in factories

MrDerp wrote: »

I once worked in a factory that used a lot of oils and chemicals, to the extent that we had our own internal (small) fire truck and trained part time fire-fighters. Everyone else had basic fire training, updated regularly.

Spills were relatively common and in the past they'd had an issue with someone simply not dumping oily rags correctly one Friday after a spill, and a on a warm saturday there was an oil fire in a bin outside. Poor ventilation caused issues also, some days the vapour fumes were high in certain zones, so they were very very strict about smoking areas.

They were mental for Health & Safety in this place, something we scoffed at but they came down hard on infractions with good reason.

There isn't a real common cause you can point to for industrial/commercial, I'd wager, in the way that 90% of Irish house fires are caused by chip pans and occur between 10pm and 3am (at least that's what I remember being told by our fire officer, don't have a link to hand). The main causes would have to be some incident arising out of poor storage of materials, inappropriate adjacency of some materials, not making a work site safe (e.g. electrical work, plumbing/gas), general non-compliance with regulations.