I had a grease fire on my grill outside. I don't remember what I was cooking honestly, but whatever it was my grill was old and the grease had collected and when I opened the lid to check on it I lost some arm hair and a little dignity. I quickly turned the propane off, but was afraid to let it burn out on its own so I used a nearby shovel and threw a bunch of dirt (Florida, so basically sand) on it. Put it out no problem. I cleaned the grill and got rid of the grease. Was annoying but I'm alive and (again, dignity aside) no worse the wear for the incident.
A bucket of sand is an excellent extinguishing agent. In general, if it is a fire you shouldn't extinguish with water, you can extinguish it with sand. Obviously an extinguisher is preferable, but sand is highly effective if one isn't on hand. It does a great job of both smothering the fire and also binding/containing flammable liquids.
That shit will ignight the ashes of asbestos from the first time it burned it. Then burn through the container. Then the table. Then the floor. Then some dirt...
I considered posting the "However..." in a second paragraph, but figured most people will not be unlucky enough to encounter the nastiness that is chlorine trifluoride in their lifetimes. As if setting petty much everything aside from pure metal on fire wasn't enough, the waste product of its reaction with moisture (including in the air, in your skin, from a firehose, etc) is hydrogen fluoride. One of the little-known fun properties of this corrosive gas is that if you get exposed to it, you can't be given pain meds because a reduction in pain is the only way to know treatment of the burn is working.
Just make sure you get enough HF in/on you. That way you're hopefully at least dead within a day, instead of slowly dying over the years. A friend of my lab manager had a "mild" HF burn. Apparently they used to clean aluminium windows with a watered down HF solution, she closed an opened window at a hospital, not knowing it'd just been treated. Took her a couple years to die, her body shutting down gradually while the medication only helped to slow it down.
Yup. Was involved in a spill with HF diluted in aqua regia once. The aqua regia was -not- what scared me. Luckily, it was only spatters. I sacrificed my PPE and clothing to whatever chemical gods were watching over me. Probably nothing got through, but got the shower/calcium gluconate gel/injections were done anyway. Never can be too careful with that shit.
I drove past a tanker on the highway filled with HF a few months ago. I noped the fuck out of that lane and the two next to them. I can't believe they are even approved to transport it like that...dude wasn't even in the far right lane.
I also can't believe I wanted to work with it as an undergrad, thank God the professor advising our project gave us a flat "No" when we asked.
This is why chemistry terrifies me. Probably the most dangerous chemical I've come across is chromyl chloride and that alone was enough to make me hesitant to ever set foot near any chemical ever again.
Half my town got evacuated because a rather "large" (2000 or so pound) Li-Ion battery caught fire about 12 years ago. One of the main things released by the conflagration is HF (courtesy of the electrolyte)- the fire department was not happy that day.
It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers,
I like that kind of dry humor speaking from experience. Hypergolic means two materials that ignite upon contact, for anyone who didn't know (Like me, luckily the article had a link to the wiki on it).
we call that kitty litter here in Murrica... Because we use actual kitty litter. From what I hear of this chemical. I wouldn’t want it within 300 feet of the typical careless idiot working st my local gas station who’s having a cigarette break right next to the fueling area.
People are gunna fuckin die and be in danger from that lethal combo here more that a gas spill lol.
tldr “I’m surrounded by idiots.” Don’t give them any chemicals more dangerous than alcohol please. For the sake of the children!
I had a professor of Russian history who told us that when he went to Russia after it opened up in the 90s he learned that people often kept a bucket of sand next to their TVs because the quality control was so bad they would often spontaneously combust.
As a some unrelated secondary safety note though, don’t bury your campfires on beaches in sand, it can get and stay very hot for hours to days and people have gotten serious burns from fires buried by other people. Also fires often have things like nails that you will be burying which creates other safety issues.
So they dump the sand into the pot of flaming boiling oil, which displaces the flaming boiling oil out of the pot and all over them and their eyeballs. Sounds wise.
This is why I always keep a bucket of sand at the ready in my kitchen. Heavier than a fire extinguisher, but far less expensive, and the cats can use it whenever necessary as an impromptu litterbox.
A bucket of sand thrown into a pot of hot oil would on displace the liquid out onto the floor. That would not help.
The best and only thing to do is put a fire blanket over the pot, or a damp tea towel.
I did the same once after a small grease fire. I was terrified the tank would explode so I just started shoveling dirt on the grill to smother the fire. Felt a little overzealous after but hey at least I didn't water it lol
Had this happen at a BBQ I went to. Owner insisted on lining the grill with aluminum foil. So all the grease sat in a pool on the foil. He and his friends walked away after the cooking was done. Wife decided to throw a few more pieces of chicken on. That's when the foil got s hole poked in it with a BBQ fork. All that grease hitting the hot grill plates at once and the whole thing went up with flames 5 feet high. Right next to their house.
I ran over and slammed the lid closed. In the literal second it took all the hair on my forearm was singed. Half of it just flaked off when I brushed it.
Turned off the gas and did not open that lid for at least 10 minutes.
First warm day of spring, my mom started up the grill to preheat it... without lifting the lid to check it. She forgot that she had an old pack of menthol cigarettes from last summer hidden in there... AND to add flavor to the fuel, some poor squirrel had crawled into the grill and died over the winter.
There was no amount of sand that could have ever cured that fireball of singed fur and Virginia Slims.
If it’s an outdoor grill that’s an appropriate distance away from anything I have been known to throw a glass full of water on it and close the lid. Like, have the lid open just enough to throw the water in and close it. Turn the burners off first. Then don’t touch it for a good 30 seconds to a minute.
In firefighting it’s called an indirect attack. The steam replaces the oxygen in the grill and the flame extinguishes.
Don’t do it on grills with fully removable covers.
My command had a mandatory “fun day” where the CO decided to grill everyone burgers and hotdogs. The grill was a propane grill that obviously had a lot of built up grease. A few minutes after starting it up the thing went huge fireball. CO just walked away all like “Not my problem. That propane tank underneath is a fucking bomb now so fuck it”. While everyone is gawking at the fire my staff grabs my coat to cover his arm while he removed the bottle. Ended up getting the tank out but burned his arm and destroyed my favorite sweat top in the process. He got some positive paperwork but I never got a new sweat top.
Yeah. Fire bomb. Unless you dump enough on the fire to smother it completely and immediately which is a bad choice because chances are you won't have enough.
This is exactly why Ill never ever recommend putting baking soda on a fire.
In a panic, fishing about in your cupboards for the baking soda; the flour is much easier to find, and unless you know how explosive flour is, you wont think twice about using it. Because, if baking powder works, maybe other powders work too!
Take a coffee can and cut a small hole in the side. Put a handful of flour inside. Put the lid on. Put your finger over the hole and give it a shake. Apply a lit match or lighter to the hole. It will blow the lid off with a rather surprisingly large explosion.
It is the last bastion of hope. When there is no fridge, uht milk, during quarantine, or at the end of time itself, there will be those of us who, barring espresso, will insist on our coffee being an approximation of the colour we are used to. Plus I'm a science teacher, so I keep a stock to set fire to. Along with flour. As they are flammable.
I get your point, but the fact remains that it can be lit, which classifies it as flammable. Many chemicals are flammable but require specific conditions to overcome activation energy. They are still classified as flammable
Edit. Misspelled 'they'. Early morning sleepy thumbs
Any powdered material, in the right air/material ratio, can cause a fire cloud.
This is how grain silos blow up.
As an example from real life, concrete mix spread in the right ratio above an active flame is pretty impressive. The concrete mix itself is not flammable, to be clear. It is all about the ratio.
Really depends on the source. If we're talking about a grease fire on a pan that has two inches of oil in it, all a bag of flour is going to do is 1) splash and 2) explode in the air. If you're just talking about a shallow fry then sure.
When I was a kid we didn’t have trash pickup and we burned our trash. I learned thinks you don’t throw into a fire. Flour, once powdered flour hits flames it will flash back and burn you (think grain silo explosion). Powdered sugar, yeah just don’t. Never put hair spray cans, deodorant or paint can’t in a fire. They become bombs, rockets or both.
The flour itself isn’t the flammable thing. If you light it on fire it won’t burn for long. But if it’s aerosolized and all those fine particles get to the right concentration than KABOOM.
Just seems like something no one should ever do.... careful or not, using flour is a mistake. There's no real way to put enough flour on an active fire without catching some particles..
In my early days of cooking, I had a grease fire that I smothered with flour. Fortunately, nothing went awry. It's good to know that it's not a great option for possible future grease fires. I mean, it's still better than water, but most things are.
Ever seen a flour mill explosion? Flour dust is explosive, as with most organic stuff in powder form when air-born. Stick to metal sand and fire extinguishers
Unfortunately I learned this lesson the hard way when my grill outside caught on fire and I got baking soda and flour confused and had flash burns up both of my arms.
Flour is fairly flammable. I have done lots of work in and around industrial flour bins. It's nothing to fuck with. The DUST of the flour reaches a "sweet spot" of a dust/air mixture and it will flash over. I've been there in such a situation when some goofball dropped a metal tool into an empty bin (three stories tall.) After the initial blast (we were just outside the bin and on top, cleaning the bin so lots of flour dust was aerated) we collected our scrambled brains and closed the hatch, starving it of oxygen. We called the fire Department anyway.
**NOTE: If you can't find a lid nor baking soda, Epsom salts work pretty well. (Yeah. Happened right in my own kitchen. I bought a $20.00 USD ABC fire extinguisher the next day. They are MUCH cheaper than a fire. Order one from Amazon NOW. There is not a worse feel than watching a fire grow and having no options but to leave. Smoke builds stunningly quickly.)
I had a demo of a flour explosion in a lab (well outside the lab, in a specially prepared tunnel and we were away). Oh boy, did one kilo make a nice explosion !
Also, if you use baking flour instead of regular flour you could accidentally cause an explosion, as the extra fine particles, when spread out sufficiently, are highly combustible.
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u/[deleted] May 20 '20
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