I am still waiting on actual hard evidence from a Doper. You seem willing. Only common ignitable substances are allowed (no metal shavings or metal wools, lint balls etc. or exotic substances meant for fire ignition). Just you, a cigarette, and anything you could find scattered on the ground including any type of everyday paper, straw, wood, or dried grass.
I am convinced that hundreds of Dopers have read this thread and tried it themselves to no avail. Negative results should be reported also.
I have seen raging fires started by a cigarette on 3 different occasions. Once in a bucket of dirty/oily rags in a bucket. Once in a wooden pier piling. And once in a cardboard box in the back of my pickup :eek: . Each of these cases had a common element - lots of air. The bucket of rags was directly beneath an open fresh air duct on the lower level of the engine room of a Navy destroyer. The pier pilings were quite dry and partially rotted and there was a very stiff breeze that afternoon. The cardboard box was under the toolbox mounted in my pickup bed and I was driving down the interstate at 60+ mph. In every case, there were definitely flames, not just smoldering.
The lesson I learned was to be a hell of a lot more careful with my ciggy butts, especially if conditions were dry and windy.
Did you miss Kalhoun’s post?
I remember my old 1958 Chevy. 4 door.
In the summertime I liked to have all 4 windows down-----for the cooling effect. (No AC of course).
My father in law never rolled the rear windows down on any car he owned. Both smokers we were.
Anyway we were driving down to the car dealer to trade the Chevy in. A pristine interior–which we hoped would be a plus for the trade. We get to the dealers just as black smoke starts pouring out of the back seat. Put the fire out with a little water ------but the damage definitely lowered the trade in value.
My father in law was so mad at me he could spit. “Nobody rolls down rear car windows ----- NOBODY”
Well of course what happened is he tossed his ciggy out the front window and it blew back in through the open back window. I tended to use the ash tray.
Burning cigarettes can cause fires------at least in car upholstery.
My older brother used to go sneak smokes out in the barn when we were kids. I can vouch for straw (and maybe a little sawdust.)
Don’t try to stub out a smoke in a building with a lot of straw and sawdust on the floor, kids. The fire didn’t get going until hours later, but it went up like a tinder box. By the time fire department showed up, they didn’t even waste any water on it – they just wet down some of the nearby outbuildings to keep them from going up.
A single discarded cigarette destroyed 73 homes. Is that enough of a campfire for you? Link.
I’d like to be able to get odds that the “former volunteer fireman” is a pyromaniac that by no means “accidently” started a fire. Guys like him are very common deliberate fire starters who hope to become heroes.
At our office, there was a large garbage can next to the toilet which was usually filled with paper towels.
ONe day, my partner went into the bathroom around 4:00 pm and inadvertantly flicked his ashes into the garbage can.
Half an hour later, I smelled something burning and went all over the building looking for the source. When I opened the bathroom door, the bathroom was engulfed in flames.
Apparantly a hot ash had hit those paper towels and started them smoldering until they flared up.
If it’d been 30 minutes later, we might’ve locked up and been gone before we noticed anything burning.
The cool thing was that about a week earlier, I’d seen the “fire extinguisher lady” in a neighboring building and asked her to get us a couple of extinguishers. She had brought them the day before this happened! I was able to put the fire out in seconds and other than a melted down garbage can and a couple rolls of toilet paper on the shelf above it, we didn’t lose anything.
Key point.
It would be a pretty lame 18th Century re-enactor who used metal wools or exotic substances to start a fire.
How in heaven’s name do you think people started fires for all the thousands of years before matches were invented in the 1800s?
Other natural tinders you overlooked that are common in wooded areas are “punk wood,” which is basically dry rot. Dried lichens are also combustable.
A lot of re-enactors use linen tow, which I’ll admit is like a lint ball, but its the naturally occuring fibers of flax plants. How anout the fluff from milk weed pods?
There’s a lot of stuff out there in nature that can be ingnited from a glowing ember that’s tossed to the ground in the great outdoors.
You can add me as a serious skeptic. I wonder how we’re having an upsurge in cigarette-caused fires when the number of smokers, and the number of cigarettes smoked, are plummeting?
My uncle had his truck catch fire when a tossed cigarette blew back into the bad and landed in a box of turpentiney rags, but that is pretty much the same as upholstery, only more explosive. I also had a friend who presented the same challenge to me: to start any kind of fire (with flame) using a cigarette. We tried dried pine needles, leaves, punky bark, paper, and nothing went up. His challenge was originally to start the fire with a discarded cigarette, but I pointed out that the cigarette migh need to land just right, and I wasn’t willing to waste all my cogarettes getting it right. It doesn’t matter what kind of cigarette you have, if the cherry is higher than the filter, it’s going to go out pretty quickly. Needless to say, we never got anything going. It certainly happens, but it’s very difficult to accomplish, and it’s such a convenient way to produce a scapegoat, that I would wonder about any statistics about it.