Earlier this month we featured a safety tip on common kitchen ingredients that can help extinguish a small grease or oil fire. This week we want to talk about the ingredients people may think will help put out a fire but actually will make the situation MUCH worse.
- Water: Logic would make you think water will put out a fire. Puts out a campfire, why not a grease fire? There is a lot of science involved in this answer (includes atoms and their polarity) but the simple answer is grease/oil do not mix. Instead, water will cause the oil to splatter and spread the fire.
- Sugar: If you mix granulated sugar with fire the composition of this ingredient melts and caramelizes when it comes in contact with high heat. This makes it ineffective at extinguishing a fire and that liquified ingredient can also lead to the fire spreading. Powdered sugar may seem like it has a similar composition to baking soda but on a scientific level, it just doesn’t. In fact, the composition of powdered sugar will cause it to combust or explode when under high heat resulting in the fire spreading.
- Flour: Though this ingredient also appears to have a similar composition as baking soda, it doesn’t. Flour is composed of complex carbohydrates which contain glucose molecules…a sugar. This makes flour high flammable and is even known to explode when the particles are suspended in the air and exposed to oxygen, a fire hazard in flour mills. Needless to say, adding this ingredient to a fire will result in an explosion.
- Milk: Just like water, putting a liquid on a grease or oil fire usually results in a larger fire. Milk does not combine with grease or oil which results in splattering and the spread of flames.
