Friday, May 1, 2009

How a Water Bowl Can Start a Fire


COULD WATER IN A DOG'S BOWL AND SUNSHINE START A FIRE?


The following post is an FYI to an article we found out about via Twitter. Original Article posted on May 27, 2009 on the ScientificAmerican.com website.

"You remember the time as a kid when you set an ant on fire. You positioned your dad’s magnifying glass a few inches above the ground, adjusting the angle ever so slightly until the spotlight of reflected rays rested precisely on your target. Then you waited.

It was innocent fun—except for some of us more sensitive folk—a sort of right-of-passage, backyard science experiment. But would you recall that lesson twenty years later while placing Fido’s clear glass water bowl on your deck?

Investigators of a house fire in Bellevue, Wash., last week are suggesting an elevated 11-inch wide glass bowl of water magnified the sun’s rays onto a wood deck, sparking a blaze that caused more than $200,000 worth of damage. Fortunately, nobody—including the two dogs—was injured.

To see if this dog bowl theory held water, Lt. Eric Keenan, the Bellevue Fire Department's community liaison officer, reconstructed the scene. He placed a partially- filled bowl on a wire stand nearly 14 inches above the sun deck at Bellevue City Hall. The atypical northwest spring conditions closely matched those on the day of the fire: a perfect “70 degrees and sunny, with light winds,” reported The Seattle Times. Sure enough, within about 15 seconds the small piece of cedar Keenan had set below the stand began to smoke under the sun’s concentrated rays.

Thomas G. Brown, a professor of optics at the University of Rochester, agrees that the scenario is plausible, at least under very specific conditions. The bowl must be transparent—preferably glass—with an overall convex shape, according to Brown. A wider bowl would need to be set further from the flammable material to concentrate the sun’s rays. (The resulting energy, however, would be far greater than that created through a small bowl – or maybe even your dad’s magnifying glass.) The skies must also be clear, dry and the sun shining from more-or-less directly overhead.

“Of course, the Seattle area is a little like Rochester—it is a rare and wonderful day indeed when we get that kind of direct sunlight out of clear skies,” Brown tells ScientificAmerican.com. “But if it is going to happen, late spring is the time.”

So knowing that this type of incident CAN occur please help yourself defeat Murphy's Law (Whatever Can Happen Will Happen) by not providing your pets with glass water bowls this summer. Or any season for that matter!

This makes sense in so many ways...pets have no business drinking out of bowls that are made out of such fragile and breakable material in the first place. Pets can break the glass. If food is dispensed out of glass bowl that breaks your pet may also ingest some of the glass so for pets sake please use plastic or pet friendly metal!

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