Spontaneous Combustion
Rags soaked with linseed oil stored in a pile are considered a fire hazard because they provide a large surface area for oxidation of the oil, and the oil oxidizes quickly. The oxidation of linseed oil is an exothermic reaction, which accelerates as the temperature of the rags increases. When heat accumulation exceeds the rate of heat dissipation into the environment, the temperature increases and may eventually become hot enough to make the rags spontaneously combust.
In 1991, One Meridian Plaza, a high rise in Philadelphia was severely damaged and three firefighters perished in a fire caused by linseed oil-soaked rags. An apartment in Sacramento also caught fire due to the spontaneous combustion of linseed oil-soaked rags.
Read more about this topic: Linseed Oil
Famous quotes containing the words spontaneous and/or combustion:
“I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“The night has been unruly. Where we lay,
Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i’ th’ air, strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible
Of dire combustion and confused events,
New-hatched to the woeful time.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)