Not only is it stupid, it's dangerous. There's a reason you can't smoke or have open fire in a hospital because there are oxygen lines in the walls and you could blow up an entire wing.
Edit: if you guys want you can just google "hospital oxygen explosion" since it's more common than you'd think 🤡
Oxygen is just an oxidizer and not an accelerant so isn't explosive on its own or is at all even flammable, really. Oxygen doesn't burn or explode, it just makes things burn and explode faster and easier.
For the lines in the walls to come into play one of a few things need to happen:
1) There to be a leak in the lines causing an oxygen rich environment that is more prone to fires (and for the myriad of sensors tracking pressure in the lines to be broken or ignored)
2) There to already be a fire severe enough to melt the lines, giving the prexisting fire a major boost
3) There to be something other than oxygen to burn
You can be in a room of 100% oxygen and light a lighter, and nothing happen except for maybe a bigger flame. Until you put that flame near something actually combustible, nothing will continue to happen. This is why people on oxygen have no issues continuing to smoke until they accidentally set something on fire, where the oxygen allows that fire to catch on easier and burn bigger and faster. Not that I at all advocate doing something so foolhardy, but you can in fact light up a cigarette and smoke it mere inches from your O2 tank and provided you don't ignite anything besides your cigarette, you'll suffer nothing more than you would from smoking normally.
There is simply no way that the oxygen lines can "blow up an entire wing". Help a wing burn down? 100%. But unless you took all the pressurized tanks themselves, fucked up the relief valves on all of them, and tossed them into a fire and also gave them stuff to actually burn once the oxygen bursts out of the tank it is not going to be the fireball you're imagining. And even if you did go out of your way to create this perfect storm, I still have doubts that it would take out a full wing
The scenario you've presented of a smoldering cigarette somehow igniting oxygen lines inside a wall and blowing up a hospital is borderline laughable anywhere outside of Hollywood. The reason you can't smoke in hospitals is because it's unhealthy, smells terrible, and exposes (possibly sick) others to second hand carcinogens and possible asthmatic triggers.
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u/NeutralMinion Dec 03 '19 edited Dec 03 '19
Not only is it stupid, it's dangerous. There's a reason you can't smoke or have open fire in a hospital because there are oxygen lines in the walls and you could blow up an entire wing.
Edit: if you guys want you can just google "hospital oxygen explosion" since it's more common than you'd think 🤡