Is My Grandma's Safe REALLY Fireproof?

Factual Questions
1

My grandma has a massive six-foot-tall safe. It literally weighs about a ton. She bought it about ten years ago. She bought it specifically because it claimed that the contents would survive a fire.

I’ve been storing important papers over at her house in the safe, but I got to wonder if it’s really true. Seems to me that in a housefire, the temperature inside the safe would have to rise to at least Farenheit 451, regardless of how well-built it is. I don’t see how it could be so well-insulated that it would repell the incredible, sustained heat of a housefire.

2

If you have the safe’s maker and model name/number it would be possible to look up its fire-safeness.

Oddly enough, a safe does not necessarily have to be “fireproof” to be surprisingly fireproof. Back in the 1906 earthquake and subsequent fires in San Francisco, countless documents and piles of cash survived inside safes and vaults as the surrounding building burned to the ground. They might have been a bit singed on the edges, but generally intact. The key is to wait until the safe is completely cold, or the hot paper inside will spontaneously ignite when given fresh air and oxygen when the safe is opened.

The key factor is exclusion of oxygen. No air = no burn. Aside from keeping the door shut, another helpful factor is keeping papers tightly together so there’s not a lot of air around the individual pages. If you unwrap a package of copier paper and place that block of paper onto a fire, it will take a fairly long time to burn, whereas the same paper dropped in loosely will burn almost immediately.

3

Most likely the safe can only withstand a certain degree of heat for a certain amount of time, while keeping the internal temperature low enough for the things in there to survive.

You’d need to find some documentation somewhere that says what that heat level and time period is.

4

Yep. This is part of the secret of banking a campfire to last overnight. Pack the coals in and lay some wood over them and then seal 'em up with some rocks. The next morning, open the rocks and lay some loose twigs over and poof! The air on the coals will ignite the twigs.

Coals=hot air inside the safe
Rocks=safe walls
Opening up safe door=opening up rocks
Papers=twigs

5

Safes fall into 2 categories, fire-resistant and burglar-resistant. Very few are both. My dad bought a credit bureau on the 2nd floor above a paint store. All the files were in “fireproof” cabinets. He arranged to have everything microfilmed, and that was about one-fourth finished when the building burned down. Nothing from the fireproof files survived.

6

How accurate must the documentation be, legally speaking? I mean-- I’ve bought some products before that claimed to do “Amazing Things!” but didn’t work worth a damn once you got them in real life situations.

If they claimed the safe was fireproof to a certain degree, does that have to be true, proven and certified? What would be my recourse if the stuff in the safe burned? Wouldn’t they just say, “Ah, well our safe is rated for *this *temperature. Your fire must have been hotter than that.”

I’m not running in with a thermometer, and though I know fire investigators can guess from surrounding items how hot a fire was, but how solid is that as evidence, given housefires have different temperatures in different areas? For example, grandma’s safe is located below a staircase and next to an old sofa. Should the house burn, the staircase would likely collapse on the safe, burning around it and thus subjcting it to higher temperatures than if the safe stood against a wall, away from highly combustible plaid furniture.

Has anyone ever successfully sued a safe company for items that were burned in a supposedly fire-proof safe?

[AskNott] Safes fall into 2 categories, fire-resistant and burglar-resistant. Very few are both.
[/quote]

She bought it specifically for its fireproof claims. She keeps everything precious to her in there.

For all intents and purposes, the safe is burglar resistant. It weighs several thousand pounds, and it has a heavy-duty four bar, two inch bolts opened with one of those rod bar handles. I seriously doubt my granny will ever be the victim of a professional cat burglar. Her likely robber would be some stupid kid who’s hoping to grab a watch or a VCR that he can pawn for beer money and get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. He’s not going to linger over trying to crack a safe. He can’t haul it away to bust it open at his leisure without a flatbed truck and a pretty heavy-duty dolley, and unless he’s got a jackhammer in his pocket (no foul jokes please) he’s not getting it open.

Hey-- just thought of something. She keeps a loaded rifle and handgun in there. At what temperature does gunpowder combust? The safe might be fire-proof, but what about bullet-proof? If that gun went off and punched a hole, everything would burn.

God, that sucks. All the documents I have in there could be replaced, but it would be a pain in the butt. Grandma keeps photos, though, and I know she’d be heartbroken to lose them. Her jewelery would likely survive-- might melt, but the stones would be okay (though to tell you the truth, I think she’d rather lose the jewelery than the photos.)

7

The photos ought to be scanned. Once they’re digital, they can be stored in multiple places - On CDs, on your PC, on her PC, wherever, making it almost impossible for the images to be permanently lost.

A bullet is unlikely to do any significant damage to the safe.

8

Underwriters Laboratories has standards for safes that claim to be fire resistant. Their standards cover three types of fire-resistant safes; one to protect papers, the second to protect magnetic tapes and the third to protect floppy disks. (It sounds like the standards might need to be updated somewhat, since neither magnetic tapes nor floppy disks are very common now.)

9

As pointed out by Dewey, there are standards. Also some fire safes use a liquid in the insulation which evaporates as heated, keeping the safe’s temp lower then it would be otherwise. Smaller safes without this liquid normally are rated for 1h, while ones w/ it go 1.5 to 2 hrs.

10

You need to be carefu about keeping firearms in fireproof safes. Because some fireproof safes use liquids for fireproofing that are not good for guns & ammo stored in the safe.

11

<minor hijack> I’ve asked the “banking” (hehe, with safes! :D) question on many a forum related to outdoors/primitive life/historical fiction and nobody has ever given me an explanation as good as that. Your text, I can visualize.
</minor hijack>

Exactly right.

12

This is horrible, I hope he was able to recover afterwards.

Though, you have to admit, that an office above a paint store, which has been involved in a fire, would likely be a bit hotter during the fire than the average house. Paint store fires are particularly scary pieces of video when one burns and you see it on TV. Flammable solvents, the paint itself, exploding spray cans, cleaning supplies, probably rolls and rolls of wallpaper… wow, scary amounts of fuel there.

A safe the size of the OP’s at 6feet tall, would probably be 3-4 feet wide, and 2-3 feet deep. I’d bet it has very heavy doors, and if it’s placed right (against the chimney, against a concrete wall, or outside wall) I’d bet the contents would survive pretty well.

As for it’s “bullet proof rating” With the exception of some very high powered rounds (.30-06 and the like), with jacketed bullets, I’d bet that nothing that hit it would do more than scratch and slightly ding the inside. I’ve shot plenty of large handguns at 1/2" plate steel, and there is no damage to the steel. A .30-30 (low end deer round) dents it a little, but only with jacketed bullets. A .30-06 will go through, barely, and not always. The “loaded in the safe” is another question entirely… if you’ve got time to take it out of the safe, you’ve got time to load it. I don’t like storing loaded weapons.

If the safe is still made, I’d be pretty sure that you could get that information online with the Manufacturer, and Model #s…

13

It cost a pile of money, but yes, the business staggered back to life. The microfilmed files were printed, and some credit records could be retrieved from other credit bureaus. Fortunately, the former owner had a near-photographic memory, and he was kept on as a consultant for a while. He reeled off most of the client billing from his head.

Most of the file cabinets fell through the burning floor, and the few files that survived the fire and the drop were destroyed by the firefighters’ water.

As for loaded guns in a safe, the hazard is not as great as it seems. The bullet of a cartridge weighs more than the brass shell, so the brass flies and the bullet stays put. Rounds in a magazine will blow apart the magazine. If a gun has one round in the chamber, that one might shoot as designed.

14

[hijack con’t]Glad it was helpful. I had to work it out on my own, because no one on those outdoors/primitive life/historical fiction sites could tell me how it was done! So I guess I can’t guarantee that that’s how “banking” is *supposed *to be done - but it works for me about 90% of the time. Some mornings you just wake up and have to start a new fire from scratch.[/hijack]