Ammo Storage

[MrBurns]

Hey guys, I was just thinking the other day about what happens when there is a building fire, and the building has live ammo, powder, etc. stored in it. I live in an apartment so I don't have any off-site place to store my ammo. I am assuming that if a building were to go up in flames with ammo in it, that ammo would go off because of the heat and bullets would go flying everywhere, possibly causing injury or death to anyone nearby. Have any of you thought about this as well? How do you all store your ammo, powder, etc.?

[Matt C]

Ammo discharging in a fire and causing injury is an urban legend. The actual bullet is much heavier than the casing, simple physics tells us the the casing will fly, not the bullet. Since the casing has little mass and poor aerodynamics, it will have very little energy upon hitting anything. Only rounds inside the chambers of weapons are any danger in a fire.

I would be much more worried about things like water heaters and BBQ propane tanks, those can destroy half your house if exposed to fire.

To answer the question though, I store my ammo in a padlocked metal cabinet, except for a few loaded mags which live in my main safe (and other places...).

[guimus]

contrary to popular belief, smokeless powder is not a high-explosive...in fact, it's amongst the lowest order of explosives. Most smokeless powders have a flammability rating of 2 (pretty low, considering what it is.) Without a chamber to contain the pressure and a primer-ignition (to make it burn much faster), the bullets will likely just pop out of the cases and then there will be fire.

Some friends at my old shop used to do "slow race" burns, where we'd each get a 7.62x54R cart, pull the bullets, and have to arrange the powder in such a way to make it burn the longest w/o going out. We routinely had burn times above 3 minutes when the powder was arranged in long, single-file lines.

[MrBurns]

Thanks for clearing that up for me guys!

[gibbet]

I had a fire. A few dozen .308 and .357 mag loads cooked off. The rounds would explode and the powder would burn a bright yellow. Some of the rounds (all .308) would launch bullets 10-15 feet. The explosions were a lot like gunfire and they were real irritating and loud. There was a lot of smoke generated but because the powder fire was so intense, I was able to see fairly well. I was laying flat on the ground to avoid the flying fragments/bullets.

The reason why I witnessed the fire was because I was trying to put it out. I didn't was my gear going up. The powder fire was intense, I had to direct a stream of water precisely on the burning mound of powder to extinguish it.

Hows that?