Dorm Fire

If that headline doesn't catch your eye, I don't know what will! I'm actually reporting on something that happened a couple of weeks ago. As I have mentioned before, I work at the BYU-Idaho Safety Office. We work on the preventative side of things, and decided to promote fire safety. It's kind of funny, because we had a grease fire this last Summer in one of the girls dorms on campus. Surprisingly, not too many people evacuated the area during the episode. There were actually videos on YouTube before the newspapers could print out the next days newspaper covering the event! So, with those ideas in mind, we decided to build a mock dorm room. The room was 8'x4'x8', with one side of dry wall missing for demonstration purposes. The small room was equipped with a desk, fabric chair, blankets, clothes on the floor, empty pizza boxes, computer, etc (sound familiar to anyone?). We promoted this thing with posters, booths, and word of mouth. One of the more effective methods was spray painting the outside walls of the dorm room "Watch me burn at 12:30", that really gets people curious. I mean, who doesn't want to see something get lit on fire?? We had it set up to start burning right when people got out of classes, and it was strategically located in a high-traffic area for maximum exposure. There were about 200 people in attendance, and many others just watching from a distance. Everyone really enjoyed the blazing flames! Considering how cold it was outside, the huge flames actually were quite warm and refreshing even though we were about 50+ feet away. We got the fire department to attend as well, just in-case. The smoke detector stopped working after two minutes, and the whole thing was fully engulfed within three minutes (despite missing an entire wall). Anyways, enough babbling. Here are the pictures.

We simulated a candle fire, candle falling into the trash can.

If you look at the top portion of the dorm room, you can see a sheet of plastic entrapping the smoke. That thing actually melted and splattered all over the asphalt in-front of the dorm room. In the next picture, you can see the asphalt on-fire.

Those flames were so intense!

The smoke eventually began to funnel...

Then the fire fighters put it out. I was actually disappointed, along with everyone else, about how soon they put it out. It would have been cool if they let it burn to the ground. It certainly would have been easier to clean up.

Rammifications of a four and a half minute fire

In this picture is what's left of the computer, and the smoke alarm.