His only other plausible explanation was ignition by something hot placed in the waste basket, such as the contents of an ashtray.
That said, if any other materials you may not be aware of were present in the towels you placed in the trash, you may have inadvertently created a scenario for a fire. Stains, solvents, linseed oils and stored hay are some common items that can cause spontaneous combustion fires.
Back in the 1970s as a teenager, I wasn't aware of this potential fire hazard and found myself cleaning up a construction site. The first day I swept up the house and assembled all the sawdust, wood scraps and stain rags in the garage to take to the dump. I put a bunch of wet stain rags in a cardboard box, and even more were chucked inside the discarded stain buckets, some with residual stain inside.
(Yes, sad to say, many builders in our area went to a landfill back in the day and openly dumped buckets of paint, drywall, demolition, stumps, concrete and other things that are now routinely recycled or composted with nary a thought. Sorry about that.
While some may now call it The Golf Club at Newcastle, to me and many others it will always be "the dump," an abandoned open-pit coal mine filled with the legacy of 600 vertical feet and 20 years of construction debris, which is partially why the views are so great.)
Getting back to the stain rags, they were still innocently sitting in the garage the next morning, so I loaded them into the back of my Toyota Prius truck. Actually it was a one-ton Ford truck that got seven miles per gallon of leaded gas (but I'm already feeling guilty about this confession and trying to make environmental amends here, so work with me in my delusions).
Not a mile down the road, I glanced in the rearview mirror and noticed flames coming out of the truck bed. The infusion of oxygen at about 20 miles an hour was enough to light off the whole back of the truck.
Fortunately, I was able to stop, pull the tailgate down, get back in and punch it. The flaming load scattered out onto the road easily. No harm came to me, the road or the truck, but it was quite a mess to clean up after the flames died down.
In that, I learned that rags used on flammable materials must always be hung up to dry separately where no heat can accumulate.
Alternatively, rags impregnated with flammables can be stored in completely closed and sealed glass or steel buckets where oxygen cannot reach them. Storage in an open cardboard box allows heat to build, easy access for oxygen, and the box is itself combustible.
That would be about the worst possible case, what I did. Storage in a pile on the floor is a recipe for a fire, as is the garbage can in your bathroom.
Darrell Hay is a local home inspector and manages rental properties. |
