Mutant Fire Discovered In Montana
Aug 5th, 2007 by Alex
MONTANA- A mutant type of wildfire has been discovered in Montana. Instead of being extinguished by the traditional water, it feeds and grows off of water. Scientists and firefighters haven’t seen anything like it before. We know that animals and humans can mutate, but fires too?
“The only way we can combat the fire is with another fire,” Mike Garner, Firefighter chief of division NS782, is in charge of extinguishing the fire. “The reason that the fire gets bigger from water is because it feeds on oxygen. A normal fire feeds on carbon dioxide and dies with oxygen. By making several regular fires around it producing carbon dioxide, we hope we can extinguish the mutant fire.”
The wildfire has gotten as big as a mile across forcing hundreds of homes to evacuate. The governor of Montana has already declared a fire emergency as hundreds of firefighters try to battle the fire.
“I’ve been in the firefighting business for forty-five years now, and I’ve never seen anything it,” Philip Ross says. “The flames are twice as hot as any fire I’ve fought, and it grows even faster.”
Time is running out. The fire has gotten just a mile away from residents’ homes. The race of extinguishing fire before it reaches the homes has begun. Several controlled fires have been made around it, and it seems to be working. Scientists are trying to find the cause of such a fire.
“I believe the fire was made intentionally in a place without oxygen. The person behind this fire got the fire to still burn forcing it to feed of Carbon Dioxide.” Joseph Hughes, a leading scientist, commented on the event.
Disclaimer:This is just a twisted story based on the news story. Why have Twisted News? To make news more interesting and to get people to read the boring news.To see the real story click here Please share your opinions and criticisms by commenting.
In your second paragraph, you have the explanation reversed. A normal fire would feed on oxygen. This new fire feeds on carbon dioxide.
And, that leads to a second question, if it feeds on carbon dioxide, why would water cause it to grow? Water is dihydrogen monoxide. No carbon in water, just two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.
Carbon dioxide is one carbon atom and two oxygen atoms.
So, if this new fire were to need carbon dioxide as opposed to oxygen, then it would need the carbon. Since dihydrogen monoxide does not have carbon, it should not be able to feed the fire and cause it to grow.
A more likely explanation would be if the water itself were to become the oxidizing agent. A fire is a rapid chemical reaction involving an exchange of oxygen. Normally, water would not be an oxidizing agent, because it is relatively stable compared to other compounds. But, with the elemental form of sodium (i.e., “raw” sodium), water (air, too) can serve as the oxidizing agent. Sodium has to be stored in an oxygen free environment, and that includes a moisture free environment, because NaOH is a stronger molecular bond and attraction than H2O. So, when elemental sodium (Na) is exposed to water (H2O), the water molecule will split, with the oxygen atom and on hydrogen atom combining with a sodium atom to form sodium hydroxide (lye) and leaving the remaining hydrogen atom on its own to form hydrogen gas.
So, possibly, you could have used a sodium-based fire, where spraying the fire with water only increased the fire. But, then you would have to explain how the fire maintained its source of sodium.
[...] I have been a little busy today, I think I will count this as my blog post for [...]
Dan you’re a brilliant guy. Too bad I haven’t taken chemistry class before, so I’m still scratching my head.
[...] thinking some more on this post and comment, I began to think, as anyone would, how this would apply to business (which could include the [...]
Love it!!!!