[King-Aaron]

> dropped cigarettes, etc

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!).

[jabl]

Another common way to die in a fire is to come home drunk from the bar, decide you're hungry and put something in the oven/stove, then pass out.

IIRC a lot of the dropped cigarette fire deaths are also related to alcohol consumption.

[FRex]

It literally said that this is a video of 'dry scotch pine tree fire' at the start, wet things of course don't burn as easily.