How to kill 100 people in six minutes or less. GRAPHIC, NSFW
The fire department is there in just over four minutes.
I haven’t had a full size tree in twenty years.
It depends what kind of electric lights you have. The modern ones used LEDs and they’re relatively low temperature. But the old-fashioned lights used regular light bulbs and they get hot. String a couple of hundred of those on a tree and you’ve got some serious heat.
If you look at the link by Senegoid, it shows the same living room image and a NIST logo - National Institute of Standards and Technology. They do safety demos like that. It was a demo filmed to show how fast a dry christmas tree will ignite and destroy the whole room.
See here.
That tree isn’t doctored. You can see a demo showing the difference between an unwatered tree and a tree kept watered.
Staged in the sense that it is a demo set up to be filmed in a lab, not a random real living room fire captured on camera. But realistic - nothing was doctored to make it burn other than what would happen in a real living room.
A smoke alarm is not going to save the room, and probably not the house. The smoke alarm hopefully will save the occupants. Anything else is gravy.
Keeping a live tree watered is absolutely a necessity for fire safety. The demo I posted shows how a live tree that is watered will not go up like a firebomb, and will give you time to use your fire extinguisher if you have one, or time to evacuate to safety and get everyone out. If you use a live tree, keep it watered daily, keep the pan full.
Serious heat, sure, but not ignition temperature. At least, not from correctly functioning lights, even big-ass incandescent C9 lights.
A wiring short or other electrical fault, all bets are off.
I had real trees draped in lights, surrounded by paper packages, luring cats into feats of daring do for decades.
(It does surprise me how many people don’t trim back the base before sticking them in water, though.)
if you have a cut tree then you should make a fresh cut just before placing the end in water.
There’s one way to make a tree absolutely fire-proof: going camping and try to start a fire on a cold rainy day.
The whole idea of a smoke alarm, if it’s working properly, is to start sending tweets well before the smoke concentration and temperature gets seriously close to the flash point – thus allowing the occupants to get out while they’re still, at worst, medium rare.
I meant to address this point, but I think it did get a mention.
Anyway, the local news did a story not long ago ( I missed the actual story, only saw the teaser), they talked about the fact that modern materials and such have changed living rooms. You used to have 10 minutes from ignition to safely get out of the house, now you have 2. With a dry tree as the starting point, yeah, less than 1.
It’s not just the flash point when the room erupts, it’s the slow build up of superheated gas and smoke that fills the room/house. You die from toxic inhalation long before the room goes boom. That’s one bright side to the christmas tree fire - it goes up so fast, it’s the fire that gets you. :eek: Okay, maybe not bright side. (Ouch, I just caught the pun.)
This is a PSA for everyone to go ahead and check the batteries in your smoke detectors! It’ll only take a minute, and it’s nice to know that they’re working. If you blow out a lit match directly in front of the detector, that should be enough to set it off. Make sure that any elderly relatives have someone help them with it as well - it’s probably even more important for someone who doesn’t move quite as well or as quickly as they used to.
This message brought to you by a lifetime of Christmastime fire-safety lectures courtesy of two uncles who were firefighters, and an elderly aunt who recently took a topple off a stepladder (she’s fine).
Funnily enough, my brother and sister-in-law remarked positively when I said that I had fire extinguishers (one CO2, one powder) at home, so I’ve got them a pair as Christmas presents.
I give them as house warning, wedding, and baby shower gifts.
You still need smoke detectors to give the warning.
Given that one cannot rent or sell an apartment or house without smoke detectors, I figure they’ve got that wrapped.
Actually the vast majority of the time, yes it does.
This type of offgassing would require very specific conditions that would probably not happen naturally.
The situation you describe is a flashover
and such situations occur in well involved situations with large volumes of fire load being brought to 900+ degrees. You don’t get rooms at that kind of temperature from a smolder, a room sealed up enough to get anywhere near that hot would exhaust its oxygen.
I think many (most?) people don’t have experience building fires because you quickly lean to pick dry wood.
A couple of stories. Once at a church camp, someone had scored a bunch of old pallets and piled them up on a stack 10 feet high. Those who are familiar with fires will already know the outcome. You’ve got really dry (fast burning) pinewood (fast burning), in half-inch boards (fast burning) with lots of air holes (fast burning) but close enough for the heat to cause the other boards to ignite (fast burning) and you start the fire on the bottom so the heat goes directly up to pre-heat the dry, pinewood in half-inch boards with plenty of air holes right above it.
Did I mention that it burns fast? And hot? They started it with lighter fluid and some newspapers. The entire thing was gone in less than five minutes. Well, technically the remains of the fire burned for longer and they were adding wood much more carefully after that.
It was a great way opportunity to get to know the park rangers. They had been on the other side of the lake when they saw the flames a good 50 feet into the air.
Another time, we helped my aunt cut down a number of dead trees, weeds and such in her completely neglected backyard. Utah summers get really dry so everything was just waiting for a good fire. Which the aunts decided would be a good idea. The stack of trees and weeds went over our heads. My cousin and I vigorously objected, but were overruled, so we took off, not wanting to any part of it. Oh, I forgot that the pile was fairly close to her neighbors house. Not right next to it, but close enough that the smoke singed the paint on the second floor. Apparently, from what another cousin reported, things got ugly with the pissed-off neighbor and my aunt yelling back and forth.
I’m trying to remember the name of the movie we saw, but perhaps it would have been more entertaining to have stayed.
Yes, that was in my earlier post, but thanks for pointing it out again.