Ammo and fire

When you are crawling on your belly through a smoke filled structure, and ammo cooks off, you leave. And who leaves their ammo on a plate to warm up gradually? In a real fire, think how you store your ammo. Ammo can? How do you think the pressure is going to impact your life if you are near that and it pops.
P. S. Firemen shovel coal in a train. Firefighters fight fire.

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Understandable. For reasons that seemed good at the time, I kept my black powder in the house instead of in the shop along with the smokeless. When the house burned, none of it ignited; I have a scorched can of FFFg (and a scorched bottle of whisky) on the mantel of the new house. True, the firefighters threw the most of it, all but that one can, out the window as they went through the place. My friends recovered it while I was in the hospital. (Not burned, I had to bail out the upstairs window, landing with injury.)

I tried to salvage ammo that had been exposed to smoke, steam, and water, but not flame. The USGI .45 was fine, as was much of the .22 LR. Some of the rest was, some wasn't. The pretty red stuff around the bullet and the primer on S&B is NOT effective waterproofing, I pulled most of a case down to salvage the brass and bullets. Reloads with lead bullets had fewer misfires than jacketed.

The worst was some .45 ACP reloads I had made up with every reasonably suitable powder I could round up. I had intended to shoot at night to see what powder gave the least and most muzzle flash. But I could no longer line up an after dark range, so I decided to just plink them away. They LOOKED good, although the baggies were heat damaged. I broke two extractors before I realized that cooked powder is not a good idea and pulled the rest.
 
And here I thought the new PC term was Combustion Remediators.

"And who leaves their ammo on a plate to warm up gradually?"

I suspect that the "warm up gradually" protocol intends to match the rise of temperatures found in a spreading fire.



"In a real fire, think how you store your ammo. Ammo can?"

No. I don't store my ammo in an ammo can.

But, in fires where ammo stored in ammo cans has cooked off, it doesn't all go off at once, turning the ammo can into a bomb.

In virtually every case I've see the rounds have cooked off individually, effectively raising pressure in the can to the point where the can will fail, but not explode into a shrapnel bomb.
 
I put a couple of primers in a frying pan, stood back, and waited.

After about five minutes, I had two primers buried an eighth-inch in the eight-foot ceiling over the stove.

I don't know about cooked-off bullets, but I wouldn't want primers shooting at me.
 
"...going off hitting everything..." Nope. When ammo cooks off in a fire, the bullet doesn't have much velocity. The bullet usually goes nowhere. Scary as all get out if one goes off near you, but it's not particularly dangerous.
Firefighters are more concerned with elderly CRT TV's and computer monitors than they are with ammunition.
Chicago Fire is a TV show. Nothing in TV shows or movies is remotely real. Even the sound of a gun shot is added in editing. TV people don't think real gun shots or blanks sound real enough.
 
I liked the reply by Kozak6 the SAAMI video is informative.
Here we go, folks. Got 25 minutes?

SAAMI on ammo fires:
https://youtu.be/3SlOXowwC4c

Very low velocities are generated by unconfined ammo, so standard turnout gear is enough to protect firefighters at a reasonable working distance.

And then a little bit of water just shuts the fire right down. It's amazing.
Click to expand...
Another link to the video.

My biggest nightmare would be chambered rounds in loaded guns in a fire. That and as mentioned those nasty little primers zipping around.

Ron
 
It will simply just blow up the case and send the bullet a few feet and the most danger would be the metal case popping an eye out if you're close enough without eye pro... But they're firemen so they wear masks, therefore, they had nothing to worry about.
 
so how firefighters?

Firefighters: If you don't want the firefighters to back off and not save your house, what is the approved firefighter method of storing ammo that would still allow you to enter a house and put out a fire? PS: you dudes and dudetts are some brave people! Thanks for all you do!
 
i spent 50 years doing EOD type stuff including a career in US Army EOD. Have burned hundreds of millions, maybe a billion or two, of small arms rounds. When burned in the open, bullets and fragments of cartridge cases are seldom projected more than 20-30 feet.

12.7mm and 14.5mm cartridges with steel cases are dangerous when burned. But few folks have that ammo.

 
Reloadron said:
My biggest nightmare would be chambered rounds in loaded guns in a fire.
Ron
Click to expand...

I have been asked this many times since keeping a loaded gun available in your home is what I help with.

Most handguns with a defensive round chambered will not penetrate 7GA (3/16") steel plate. Thinner steel could be an issue ;)
 
the army prepared documents regarding fire at a storage facility. the recommendations, iirc, protect other buildings from fire only if possible. get personnel several hundred yards away or behind a minimum four inch concrete barrier about 100 yards away. the army was discussing many tons of ammo in concrete walls of varying calibers. .50 explosive rounds are not to be taken lightly at short ranges. the general plan was let it take care of itself and be far enough away to keep debris from landing on people.
 
Good to know to alert firefighters about stored ammo, if a fire broke out where I live, I am not even sure I would think to do that (until now). So basically if you've got like 10, 20, 30,000 or so rounds stored inside, you should basically expect the firefighters to just let the place burn down?
 
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Better to have them back off and have the well-insured structure be a total loss than to have it be salvageable anyways.

I'm with others. Without a chamber or a barrel this is a non-issue. MAYBE a semi-auto could cook off ammo without sustaining enough damage to not cycle but I doubt that. The local fire-chief, who I have asked about this in the past, seemed unconcerned about it actually be an issue.

Around here if the policy were to not attempt to stop a fire because of a concern of ammo most houses would be allowed to burn. Most people, around here at least, have at least some ammunition stored in the house.

I would be more concerned about cans of certain cleaning products and other pressurized cans. In my dumber days I have watched these exit fires at high rates of speeds
 
Any semiautomatic would fail so fire repeat rounds. Handguns would limp wrist. Rifles would almost certainly have have several rounds cook off in the magazine before the chamber would. For that matter, rifles are usually stored upright and maybe only one in six will be loaded, on average. The probability of a gun going off and accidentally hitting and injuring a firefighter is pretty low,I believe. It would probably go completely unnoticed.

Some people remain seriously concerned about powder or ammo. Consider this. A house is engulfed in flame containers are non explosive. Will even 20 pounds of powder do much during a complete burn? It doesn't burn hot, or explode. It can start a fire, but if there is a big one already going, 1,000 degrees, heavy flames, it's going to be a burp. I think that people should set sprinklers over their bench.
 
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