From the course: Occupational Safety and Health: Fire and Emergency Preparedness
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The fire triangle
From the course: Occupational Safety and Health: Fire and Emergency Preparedness
The fire triangle
- In the United States, there were 16,500 office and store fires in 2020 that caused over $932 million in direct property damage. Understanding the source of those fires, how they start and how they can spread, can help save lives and reduce property damage. Let's start by looking at the physics of a fire. The fire triangle, or some people call it the combustion triangle, is a simple model for understanding the necessary ingredients for most fires. The triangle illustrates the three elements a fire needs to ignite and continue burning. Those are heat, fuel and oxygen. Since a fire needs all three of these elements to burn, removing any one of them will put a fire out, and that's a simple concept, but one that's important to understand. Let's take a look at why that is. One of the main causes of workplace fires is the same as fires at home, kitchen fires. Stoves, ovens and hot plates provide the heat, and flammable cooking ingredients like oil provide a source of fuel. But to burn, a…
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