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by PhasmaFelis
3153 days ago
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Making sure your sprinklers are in working order seems like a good start. Also, based on the video I'd say "don't keep dry Christmas trees around." I dunno how they ignited that tree, but it went from fine to ceiling-high inferno in four seconds flat. I don't think typical furniture will catch nearly that fast in typical home-fire circumstances (overheated electrical devices, dropped cigarettes, etc). I wonder if keeping the tree in a watering stand and topping it up regularly helps. |
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I remember reading an article a while ago (https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/statistics/v13i6.pdf not sure if it's still valid as it's from 2010), but a significant number of fatal house fires start in the bedroom due to dropped cigarettes... The report mentions that 2% of residential fires are smoking-related, and an average of 365 deals (i.e. in the United States, someone dies every day from setting their house on fire due to smoking!!). So clearly cigarettes can burn a house down pretty rapidly. I would assume, of course, that a substantial number of those deaths would have been people falling asleep and dropping the cig, which probably negates the speed of the fire spreading as being a factor.
Synthetic materials in furniture, carpet, clothing etc burns extremely rapidly as seen in the video. Not to mention that the tree looked to be very dry, and went up like dry grass would. In that situation, the radiated heat from that tree would be more than enough to rapidly set fire to the furniture around it.
An anecdote I can refer to myself is having dropped a cigarette in the car once, and having the entire rear bench-seat catch on fire within moments. (Car was moving at 100kph, so I assume the extra air forced into the environment didn't help!).