Thisvideo’s doing the rounds on Facebook.
It shows a living room with a Xmas tree turn into a raging inferno (courtesy of the Xmas tree lights) in a little over a minute. The Facebook and Youtube commentariat are predictably amazed, appalled and (probably) blaming Obama.
Is this for real? It seems kind of set-up to me, but perhaps I am naive about fire safety…
Once they get dried out, they are dangerous. I once torched our tree upon removal just to see how fast it would burn.
BOOM; it was engulfed in seconds. Never had a tree again.
This one takes a little longer, but it didn’t have a highly flammable tree to get it going.
I think that your video is staged but quite realistic. Get a flame retardant tree.
Given an ignition source, yes, a pine tree can become consumed by flame in a remarkably short time, seconds. The needles become increasingly flammable as the tree dries out and the pitch is what composes the organic firestarter I use instead of lighter fluid on the grill. Beyond that it then comes down to what additional flammable surfaces and items you’ve surrounded your tree with.
If someone must use electric lights on a real tree it’s probably best to get LED (or the like) and to make sure the cord is in good condition and replaced at suitable intervals.
I once bought a UL tested and approved set of Christmas tree lights from Wal-Mart for our first Christmas in our (then) new house.
I plugged them in just to check for burned out bulbs before I put them on the tree and the string was in flames in less than 30 seconds. I hate to think of what would have happened if I hadn’t decided to check them first.
As mentioned upthread the tree itself is very flammable, so yeah, it’s plausible.
Back in my misspent youth I & some pals gathered up about a dozen used Xmas trees the neighbors had set out for trash pickup. This was in warm SoCal, and the trees were starting to turn brown & were shedding a bunch.
We made a nice pile of the dozen trees arranged teepee style. This was in a vacant lot on a sandy bare surface. We lit one sheet of newsprint at the base.
20 seconds later I couldn’t stand within 40’ of the inferno spewing 30’ flames. The flames were definitely taller than nearby 2-story houses. It burned insanely for a couple minutes, then impressively for 10 minutes and moderately for the next half hour.
Had the surface been grass, we’d have had a first class brush fire almost immediately.
Not something I’ve ever done since. To think each of those trees was inside somebody’s living room & wired for heat with the cheapest imported junk electrics just a few hours ago was sobering. Even to a teenager.
You have to have the right set of circumstances, but yeah. That tree is in a corner, and kind of tight. My mother was a widow who remarried about 10 years ago, and my stepfather is Lutheran, so they have had trees a couple of times, and I think they have LED lights, but they make sure the tree is pulled out from the wall, and plugged into a socket far away from the tree, so if it happens to surge, it won’t spark the tree. I think the big danger is overloaded plugs right by the tree (think of A Christmas Story). They also don’t put it close to any furniture, and they still keep a fire extinguisher handy. My mother is a little paranoid, and my stepfather was in the Navy for 30 years, and loves to be prepared for every possibility.
FWIW: I don’t think a smoke alarm would have saved that room, although I suppose it could have saved the house at the expense of the room.
When my parents have had a live tree, they have put it in a stand that has water in it, so it keeps the tree moist. I don’t know if it makes the tree less flammable-- maybe it buys you a little time.
Do light strings have fuses?
Man - I learnt something today…
I would have thought someone would have posted about the Mythbusters episode on this topic by now…they were just going for the heat of the lights as a source of ignition, but they used WAY more lights than normal and were unable to get temperatures high enough for ignition.
Synopsis here.http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/mythbusters/mythbusters-database/christmas-tree-lights-and-house-fires.htm
I once filmed a 6-foot tree, freshly purchased from a tree lot, which we ignited.
The fire completely burned itself out in 50 seconds. We filmed it for a TV public service safety message.
Before there were electric tree lights, they used candles. The candles would be placed on the tree with extreme care, the whole family would sit and watch while Dad went around and lit them all, and after a couple of minutes of that extravaganza, they were extinguished with a sigh of relief and that was the annual lighting of the tree.
It is probably true that the heat from electric lights would not ignite a tree.
Here on the SDMB, its mentioned that a fresh cut conifer is decorated with lit wax candles – to go even further back in tradition. People sine one carol around it, then extinguish it. When I was a kid, we had a fresh tree sometimes, with old fashioned big bulb lights. We never turned them on unattended.
Everyone here is describing that a tree can go up in flame very quickly. But the OP is asking if the entire room can be engulfed in flame that fast, which nobody has addressed yet. (Well, it’s obvious right?)
I saw a video explaining how that happens. It wasn’t about Christmas trees, but about fires in general and why smoke detectors are so important.
See, y’all probably have this notion that a fire begins in some localized place within a house or other structure, or a tree, and then gradually (or maybe not so gradually) spreads to engulf the whole room then the whole house.
It doesn’t necessarily happen that way. A wire could get hot in the wall and set the surrounding material to smoldering slowly; or it could happen in other ways that you have a slowly smoldering fire in a localized spot. This can cause the flammable oils in the wood (certainly in a drying tree) to evaporate, filling the room with flammable gas, which gradually gets hotter and hotter. It may eventually reach the flash point temperature, in which moment the whole fucking room abruptly explodes into a flaming fireball all at once! The public safety video I saw showed this happening. (Not sure how they created that video. It might have been staged.) If this happens while you’re snugly asleep in your bed, you’re charcoal.
The whole idea of smoke alarms is to provide some advance warning that this is happening, before it actually happens.
Once a fire gets past the incipient stage, you’ve got two or three minutes to get the heck out before flashover, which is the technical term for “abruptly explodes into a flaming fireball all at once!”
If a fire can fit in a wastebasket, it’s incipient. Anything larger, and it’s gone to the growth stage, and is well on the way to being too large to put out with a home fire extinguisher. If you’re unfortunate enough to still be in the room, you’ll see a layer of black smoke descending from the ceiling and it’s starting to get hot in there. This is when the fire is moments away from flashover.
A few years ago, I helped produce a home fire sprinkler demonstration. We set up those rooms with real-world curtains and furniture from thrift stores. Nothing was doctored to burn faster or hotter, but at 90 seconds, the room without a fire sprinkler was a really bad place to be.
As a kid, I felt like the epitome of the Christmas celebration was burning the tree. We’d cut branches into pieces that would fit in the fireplace watch them go sizzle-crackle-whoosh! with flames shooting right up the chimney. (Disclaimer: As an adult, I realize that this not the safest homeowner behavior.)
In fact, if you watch forest fire videos, you can see the same thing happen to full-size, fresh trees. Under the right conditions, they don’t burn so much as explode.
As for the whole room igniting quickly in the video… it doesn’t really surprise me. When there’s a very high source of heat, objects can “spontaneously” ignite even without being touched by a visible flame, especially when we’re talking about fabric and wood. 450 degrees is enough to ignite those, and that’s not all that hot in the realm of fire. The Christmas tree is burning very intensely, with no windows or vents for the hot air to escape through. (This is probably the same explanation for the video Senegoid reports seeing).
The setup is favorable to this rapid combustion - the fire starts at the bottom of the tree, the tree is right next to couches, etc. However, these conditions are common enough in real life. I wouldn’t accuse anyone of staging that video in a deceptive way.
Bump.
Whoosh! Just found this article on the PBS news site: A dried-up Christmas tree is set afire and burns to a cinder in less than ONE minute. Article includes GIF showing it happening (at 4X real speed).
GIF: Christmas tree to blazing inferno in less than a minute, Rebecca Jacobson, PBS, Dec. 17, 2014.
Yes, it really looks like it goes Whoosh!
I can attest to this. Part of my job involves setting up a Christmas tree safety demonstration. This is in partnership with the local fire dept. I have seen those trees fully engulfed before the smoke detector gets out a chirp, and indeed, MELT the smoke detector. Less than 15 sec., positively.
I come from a family of pyromaniacs. I was just an amateur, but my brother became a fire fighter and then a fire marshal.
As other people said, pine trees burn really well. Once, as a scout, our troop participated in a fire building contest. Usually contests involved boiling water, but that one was was simply to burn a rope about two feet off the ground. We were given a couple of minutes for prep time and then they rang a bell for the troops to start their fires. We were given three matches, but everything else was to be gathered there in the woods. Axes and saws were permitted.
As our troop’s fire expert, I told the other guys to forget getting any sticks, logs or even twigs. Just get as many dry pine needles as possible. Six guys racing with handfuls of pine needles can collect quite a pile in three minutes.
They gave the warning, the bell sounded, I lit a match, poof, a fireball and we won.
Yes, rooms can go up like that. My brother’s fire department burned a number of homes for training. People would let them burn old houses which were scheduled to be demolished.
There are many youtube videos showing flashover. Here’s one showing a side-by-side comparison with a “legacy room” vs. a “modern room.” The modern room has flashover in less than four minutes while the legacy one takes almost 30. There really isn’t enough information to know what materials they use, but one to two minutes could be expected with a pine tree setting it off.
I was training to be a firefighter back in the late 90s, and these videos match up with the training I got. I think the one from NIST (linked in the PBS story) got some help because the chair and sofa right next to the tree caught fire as well. But anyway, smoke does quickly fill up a room like that, so thick that sometimes firefighters have trouble even finding the fire they’re trying to put out. I’m sure there are some firefighters on the board who can speak more authoritatively than me (I was in a small volunteer department and never made it onto a paid staff before I changed careers). But when I did training in actual controlled burns, I spent a lot of time crawling around on hands and knees trying to find my way through a house filled floor-to-ceiling with thick smoke. And, as noted upthread, smoke is flammable. A room gets hot enough and everything, including the smoke, will start to burn.
Welp, now I’m going to leave work early and take down our xmas tree.
Are you guys happy?!
C. Everett Koop describes this in his book. They also placed water-filled buckets near the tree and stationed a couple of people there to deal with a fire if one arose.