![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
I woke up this morning when it started getting light (4:30 a.m. ... on a weekend, no less! aargh!) and looked out the window to see falling snow. Noooo! Normally I love snowfall but this is really getting ridiculous. Like we don't have enough snow. It was melting so nicely too. And I forgot to cover the coal pile yesterday, so now it's a coal and snow pile. Luckily it doesn't really matter all that much ... coal burns so hot that it doesn't matter if you throw buckets of snow and ice onto it along with buckets of coal, although it makes interesting noises.
I discovered something disturbing about coal yesterday ... it is known for spontaneous combustion. Like wet hay. That (and combustible dust in the air) is why coal mines tend to catch on fire. I had wondered about that, because coal is so hard to set on fire -- it's nothing like wood; hold a match to it and you may as well be holding a match to a lump of granite. But apparently, coal sitting around will slowly oxidize and the heat produced by this process is sometimes enough to set the whole pile on fire, especially when the coal is damp, because then it oxidizes faster.
*stares at pile of coal and snow in worry*
Apparently this was a common problem on steamships. Big pile of coal sitting in the hold ... coal bursts into flames ... not a good situation. The Titanic, for example. I never knew this until yesterday, but the Titanic was on fire pretty much from the time it left port. Coal doesn't burn particularly fast, and moving coal by hand is, well, impossible to do quickly if you have a lot of coal and nowhere to move it to ... so the Titanic's No. 6 coal bunker was smoldering for the whole trip. The usual remedy for this is to increase the ship's speed -- i.e. shovel the coal into the boiler as often and quickly as possible, so as to get down to the burning layer and get rid of it. There is one school of thought that the sinking of the Titanic was caused, in part, by this ship tearing at unsafe speeds through iceberg-infested waters because they were trying to get rid of a burning pile of coal.
*stares at pile of coal again*
Why is it so much harder to get the damn stuff to burn when you WANT it to?!
I discovered something disturbing about coal yesterday ... it is known for spontaneous combustion. Like wet hay. That (and combustible dust in the air) is why coal mines tend to catch on fire. I had wondered about that, because coal is so hard to set on fire -- it's nothing like wood; hold a match to it and you may as well be holding a match to a lump of granite. But apparently, coal sitting around will slowly oxidize and the heat produced by this process is sometimes enough to set the whole pile on fire, especially when the coal is damp, because then it oxidizes faster.
*stares at pile of coal and snow in worry*
Apparently this was a common problem on steamships. Big pile of coal sitting in the hold ... coal bursts into flames ... not a good situation. The Titanic, for example. I never knew this until yesterday, but the Titanic was on fire pretty much from the time it left port. Coal doesn't burn particularly fast, and moving coal by hand is, well, impossible to do quickly if you have a lot of coal and nowhere to move it to ... so the Titanic's No. 6 coal bunker was smoldering for the whole trip. The usual remedy for this is to increase the ship's speed -- i.e. shovel the coal into the boiler as often and quickly as possible, so as to get down to the burning layer and get rid of it. There is one school of thought that the sinking of the Titanic was caused, in part, by this ship tearing at unsafe speeds through iceberg-infested waters because they were trying to get rid of a burning pile of coal.
*stares at pile of coal again*
Why is it so much harder to get the damn stuff to burn when you WANT it to?!