For many different types of buildings, there are different types of fire suppression systems. For instance, residential homes can sometimes get away with only using a fire extinguisher to handle a small home fire.
For more industrial problems though, you need a heavy-duty fire suppression system to be able to combat the types of fire hazards that come along with kitchens, computers, and large HVAC systems. In this video, we see one example where instead of using water to extinguish the fire in the building, which would be the traditional method, they use foam to extinguish the fire. This works much better a lot of the time because if it were an oil fire, water would only entice it even more. Foam does something called smothering, where instead of drowning the fire, you make it so that the fire can’t get any more oxygen. On a smaller scale, this is why you see people running out of burning buildings wearing blankets. If you were to soak yourself in water, that would eventually dry off and you would get burnt. A thick material actually prevents the fire from contacting your skin for as long as the blanket isn’t burnt.
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