This PSA is absolutely right in what it's saying, but throwing water on to a grease fire does not equate to throwing gasoline onto it. Gotta love exaggeration.

i don't get it MGR, where is the exaggeration? they didn't throw gasoline on it to cause that huge flame, that was water.

But in Pokémon water>fire?

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Like qruel said, what was thrown by the fireman was water. what gasoline are you referring too?

It's an easy misunderstanding. It simply looks unbelievable. If you've never seen it, it looks like shenanigans. Qruel's description looks accurate. I've heard sodium bicarb works too. Haven't tested it.

I'll try and rack my addled brain for an analysis of this in terms of amateur physics.

Heat is a physical property, and relates directly to energy. Fire is not, its a chemical process, called combustion. Combustions requires Oxygen.

There are many methods of extinguishing fire, and which is appropriate depends on the properties of the material that is combusting, inorder to be effective. There are 2 primary mechanisms of extinguishing a fire of which I am aware, and they rely on either:

1. removing the heat energy form the situation.
2. removing oxygen from the situation.

Chemical processes (e.g. combustion) require an activation energy level to be achieved in the system before they will occur. Cooling/removing heat lowers the energy in the system and can prevent the reaction. Differnt materials have a different activation energy before combustion will start, so this method is very material dependent.

They also, as noted, require oxygen. Oxygen can be prevented from access to a body/clothes, by coating them in water. the water then acts as a barrier to the oxygen. It can also cool a material (by extracting some of the heat energy, and being changed from cool water to warm/hot/boiling/steam/super heated steam...

Oil well fires can be put out by explosions, because this process rapidly exhausts the available oxygen in the region of the fire. The oil on fire is "put out" because oxygen is starved form the chemical process. What you are left with is "Hot oil", which dose not spontaneously reignite as it takes a flame for oil to begin to combust. That flame, adds a very localized area of very high energy (oil burning releases a LOT of energy) and that is enough to archive the activation energy of the combustion of oil, making it a self sustaining reaction (oil on fire stays on fire). But simply being Hot is not enough.

CO2 fire extinguishers work on electrical fires, where putting water would be bad for the material. The CO2 floods the area, pushing the oxygen out. Once the oxygen is deprived, the fire goes out. Because they shoot out gas, they could blow a lite particulate material all over the place, and so might not be advisable to use in all fires.

Back to Chip pan Fires:

Water and oil don't mix. Throwing water on burning oil, does not "coat the oil", separating it from air, and thus water will fail to prevent oxygen from fueling the combustion process. However, the water will get hot. Very hot, and very fast. The water will become agitated steam, having sunk into the oil (it doesnt get that hot instantly, it has to become so after contact whit the hot oil has been sustained, and as it wont float on the oil or mix well with the oil, it will be sinking into it).

So, you have oil, a very hot and combusting liquid. Inside this combusting liquid, you add another liquid that is transitioning from liquid to gas (water -> steam) and when water changes state into steam, it has a volume change. the same volume of H20 as a liquid takes up a LOT more volume when its a gas at the same pressure. This gas, flows up through the oil at high speeds, as it expands. Invariably, this force of up rushing gas takes the burning oil with it, distributing upwards and into the room and smearing burning oil all over the room, and possibly you. BAD.

The solution:

Place a fire retardant material (one that needs a VERY high activation energy for it to ever combust, a lot higher than the heat of a standard kitchen fire), over the chip pan. This acts as a barrier to oxygen. Oxygen will not pass through this material into the pan, and so, the remaining oxygen trapped between the surface of the oil, and the material covering the top of the pan, will soon be exhausted. The fire will go out (combustion end) as soon as the oxygen has all been used.

Although professional kitchens are likely to have a special cloth somewhere on the wall for this very purpose, you can improvise at home. Take a cloth, wet it, and wring it out, as directed. The purpose, is that you need to make the cloth a barrier to oxygen (air). Making it damp, will mean that water molecules are trapped in the holes/weave of the material, and so its much better at preventing air to travel through it. Also, the water itself wont combust (water doesn't burn) and, because it is coating the cloth, the water is also a barrier to the oxygen touching the cloth. This means that the cloth cant burn. The heat of the fire would dry the cloth out, if the stove is not turned down, and this would be bad. IF the cloth is not "wrung out" it will be dripping. Water dripping form the cloth, into the chip pan fire would be bad, especially if it was dripping as you laid it over pan. Not moving the pan when tis heavy, and filed with burning oil, and likely to be so hot you drop it, is also self explanatory.


I hope that makes sense, explains what happened, and why the correct method works.

I never meant that it was indeed gasoline, but I've seen water thrown onto a grease fire, and it didn't make a huge fire ball, but just spread the fire around.

I've never seen the "Kitchen Oil Fire gone terribly right" video.

I don't think anyone has ever put sugar on a fire to put it out..

Perhaps no one that's ever done it lived to tell the tale?

So, water + grease fire = bad; sugar + grease fire = very bad...
that begs the question, what if you pour a liter of cola on a grease fire? Two negatives cancel each other out, right? Right??

It is possible to smother a small fire with salt. If you grab the sugar by mistake it is very bad. I've seen that before, when there was a grease fire on a dirty grill. We threw salt onto it, but we used all the salt that was in the little mise en place dish right by the grill, so the chef went to grab more salt, but grabbed the sugar by accident. A large fireball ensued.

I don't like this title, it's totally misleading.

Thylan is right... i had to do this once at home.
i thought everyone knew about the wet towel trick but my girl wanted to put the pan under the tap. lucky i was there to stop her.
didn't know about the salt thing...

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