A thought on ammo buying/hoarding

[GW]

On another forum I frequent someone has the amusing signature
"There's no such thing as too much ammo. Unless your house is on fire." It always gave me a chuckle until recently with the ammo feeding frenzy thats been going on.

I wonder what fire departments will do when an apartment/house/garage goes up and thousands of rounds start cooking off. Very few among us have the room or $$ to have an actual magazine on their property. So I wonder, what will be the result of a fire with lots of ammo involved. New laws? Most likely but what?

Let the discussion begin!

[laguns]

Maybe a fireman can chime in on the possible dangers but I certainly would recommend keeping five hundred to a thousand rounds of ammo for every caliber you own, and obviously storing them as safely as possible.

Ted

[randy]

Maybe it wouldn't be as bad as a gallon of gas.

[AlexBreya]

Thats why i have a fire proof safe! Honestly though, i'm much more worried about the pounds of powder i have for reloading.

[gwl]

I vaguely remember reading about a guy's house in SoCal catching on fire. It didn't burn to the ground but there was a considerable amount of damage.

In the end, fire investigators discovered his still intact basement level gun room/vault/bunker or whatever you want to call it . . . with over half a million rounds of mixed caliber ammunition.

This would have happened about a year or two ago,.

[Rob454]

I vaguely remember reading about a guy's house in SoCal catching on fire. It didn't burn to the ground but there was a considerable amount of damage.

In the end, fire investigators discovered his still intact basement level gun room/vault/bunker or whatever you want to call it . . . with over half a million rounds of mixed caliber ammunition.

This would have happened about a year or two ago,.

yeah whatever happend to that guy? Personally from what I talked to my bro in law ( fireman) he said most of the time they let it cook off they cant do much about it except throw water on it hoping to cool it down but when its 2500 degrees he said its like pissin in the wind ( his words)

[jb7706]

Your house will likely burn to the ground as the fire department watches and waits from a safe distance. Not many fire captains are going to send men to battle fires where explosives/powder/stuff that goes bang is stored. At most they will try to limit the spread of the flames to surrounding structures.

[gwl]

yeah whatever happend to that guy? Personally from what I talked to my bro in law ( fireman) he said most of the time they let it cook off they cant do much about it except throw water on it hoping to cool it down but when its 2500 degrees he said its like pissin in the wind ( his words)

I'm not too sure but I think he may have paid a fine or something.

[TonyM]

Thats why i have a fire proof safe! Honestly though, i'm much more worried about the pounds of powder i have for reloading.

If you keep your powder in the containers that they come in, and don't do anything like put them in a metal jug or glass jar, you have nothing to worry about.

The plastic jugs are made to melt at a low temp in a fire and then the powder will just flash as if you lit it on concrete, no explosion.

[abalone hunter]

we lived in idaho and a guy's house up the hill from us caught on fire and the f.d. let it burn because they knew there was alot of ammo in there. we had pops going off for a week. guess who bought our house a few weeks later.

[FreedomIsNotFree]

My understanding is the bullets won't "fly" unless the ammunition is in the chamber of a gun...that the primer will likely fire, but without the chamber/barrel directing the pressure there is little chance of harm.

[Adonlude]

What do you mean by having an "actual magazine" in ones house?

Bullets cooking off in a fire aren't that dangerous. The bullet usually has much more mass than the casing so the casing just shoots off with a less than deadly amount of force. Bullets are dangerous in barrels because the casing is held in place and all the energy in the explosion is used to push the bullet down the barrel at a velocity that increases as a length of the barrel.

No barrel = no concentrated energy = very little velocity

[elrcastor]

What do you mean by having an "actual magazine" in ones house?

Bullets cooking off in a fire aren't that dangerous. The bullet usually has much more mass than the casing so the casing just shoots off with a less than deadly amount of force. Bullets are dangerous in barrels because the casing is held in place and all the energy in the explosion is used to push the bullet down the barrel at a velocity that increases as a length of the barrel.

No barrel = no concentrated energy = very little velocity

possibly something like the stuff from here http://www.usexplosive.com/

[rabagley]

What do you mean by having an "actual magazine" in ones house?

Bullets cooking off in a fire aren't that dangerous. The bullet usually has much more mass than the casing so the casing just shoots off with a less than deadly amount of force. Bullets are dangerous in barrels because the casing is held in place and all the energy in the explosion is used to push the bullet down the barrel at a velocity that increases as a length of the barrel.

No barrel = no concentrated energy = very little velocity

That's most of it. Even better: smokeless powder is not an explosive. At atmospheric pressure, smokeless powder does not explode but burns. It burns somewhat impressively, but it doesn't go bang! (unlike black powder, which will go bang, and needs much more careful storage). Smokeless powder needs to be at high pressure to burn fast enough to do useful work.

In a firearm chamber, the primer and the first bits of smokeless to burn increase the ambient pressure for the rest of the powder. The brass gets pressed up against the chamber walls and the with the chamber for strength and the brass for a seal, up goes the pressure. Then the rest of the powder really gets cooking and burns fast enough to kick the bullet out the business end of the firearm.

Outside of a chamber, it's a lot less exciting. The powder overheats and begins to deflagrate and begins to increase pressure. But there's no chamber to provide the strength needed to hold the pressure, the brass splits with a "barrel failure", and you get a low pressure spurt of slow-burning powder out the side of the cartridge.

If you were too close to this event, you would probably get a nasty burn and there might be some small pieces of brass from around the split that could fly out and cause additional injury. According to the NRA, which at one point made a large bonfire and then piled shells of all descriptions on the fire, no metal fragments were found more than two meters from the fire perimeter. It did sound pretty cool, though.

[rg_1111@yahoo.com]

Two safes one for guns the other for ammo. The water sprinklers are over both safes. My stash will be OK.