Just because a warehouse dock seal is made of "fire retardant" material does not make it "fire resistant."

That misconception has contributed to the more than 100 incidents of dock seal fire damage that have occurred since mid-2001 at loading dock areas across the country. More than 200,000 loading dock areas are at risk of such fires.

Safety distributors and warehouse owners can help solve this problem by acquainting themselves with a new material developed by the Frommelt Company, a division of Milwaukee-based RiteHite, Inc. In fact, it was during the process of determining the causes of most of these fires, that Frommel developed what it believes is the most effective preventive material to date—the Frommelt Firefighter.

Chuck Ashelin, an engineering manager at Frommelt, explains that fire retardant material must actually begin burning in order to work, i.e. extinguish itself. Fire resistant material will not allow enough heat to build up to start a fire.

Most of these fires originate during the loading/unloading period when the semi-trailer's rear marker lights (usually placed at the top of the truck) were compressed against the padding, or dock seals, around the loading zone. While compressed against the dock seal, the marker lights—normally cool to the touch—can build to a sufficiently high temperature (is 800 degrees F) for the seal to begin smoldering. The technology in the Frommelt Firefighter limits temperatures to about 400 degrees F, Ashelin explains.

Bard Bodi sells the Firefighter as a sales representative for the Arbon Equipment Corp. in Cleveland. There is no "typical" customer for the Firefighter, he says.

"The end user has nothing to do with it. It's the type of vehicles and size of loading dock door that they use that determines if there might be a fire," adding that in his Ohio area he has sold the Firefighter to manufacturers and companies as varied as a newspaper publisher and a steel coil company. And as customers have become better educated on the problem, sales have become steadier, Bodi says.

"They know they have a [potential] problem and are just happy someone has made a product that will prevent it from happening," he says.

Bodi estimates that the Firefighter is maybe "20-25 percent" more expensive than conventional fire retardant seals. "To keep a fire from happening, though, these extra material costs are nothing compared to what damage a fire could do."

Tony Leggiero, a field service representative for Arbon in Albany, N.Y., says warehouses have been his best customers for the Firefighter. He has sold it by focusing on its safety advantages, as well as its money-saving potential, reminding customers that "insurance companies like it when you do anything that helps you become safer."

When a dock seal fire breaks out in a warehouse, even if the damage is minimal, word travels quickly.

"Others in that area will know about the fire and ask me questions as to why it happened," Leggiero says. "I have sold quite a bit [Frommelt Firefighter] to several companies. The bottom line is that if you put this on your wall, your building is not going to catch on fire because of marker lights on a trailer."