There are few things worse than a tire fire. If you have ever seen a single tire burn you know what kind of an acrid smelling, black smoke belching mess that can be. Now multiply that by 150,000 times and you get the scene that literally erupted outside of Melbourne, Australia recently. More than 100 firefighters battled the blaze and while we’re not sure how long it took, the word battle is not being overused there because when you see what these guys were up against, it was literally a war. The largest fires in the recorded history of North America are almost exclusively tire fires. One such blaze in Ohio resulted 5-million charred tires and a near decade long cleanup of the site to get the environment remediated.
Here’s a look at the worst tire fires of all time and while this hellacious situation in Australia may not be a top 10 event, it is still really bad. The long shot of the smoke rising miles outside the city is pretty amazing for nothing else to illustrate the thickness and terrible nature of the smoke generated. Your burnout produced the white puffy kinds of smoke. A tire fire creates the choking death kind of smoke that people have to run away from or suffer immediate and serious health consequences.
So the bottom line is that if you are inside a tire dump, keep the plasma torch off, don’t launch the fireworks quite yet, and refrain from smoking. If you are looking at real estate bordering a tire dump run. Run like your hair is…well, you know.
Watch the video and then hit the link below to see the news story that talks about the fire. Nasty stuff for sure!
We had a bad tire fire in Everett, WA. 20 plus years ago that burned for weeks maybe longer.