When i used to smoke i carried a metal tight-sealing, portable ash tray. More smokers should do that.
This is why I stop and put mine out on the bottom of my shoes and put the butt back in the box.
Wouldn’t you still risk sparks falling, possibly igniting dried grass?
Not sure if that is actually possible from the few sparks that fall, just a question.
I step on em. I like to make sure there’s no chance.
Maybe but it’s a lot harder to start a fire with a cigarette than most people think. You need to be in a dry area for sure, and have good air flow. The tests people point to a lot are that if you drop a cigarette into gasoline, it will just put the cigarette out. If you drop it in grass, it is highly unlikely it will ignite anything. When they set up dry hay to test it they had the best odds of setting one. There were studies where they lit cigarettes and left them on different fabrics, and found 5/300 fabrics could actually catch fire.
If you pick up a leaf and try to light it with a cigarette it will fail unless it’s fall, and even in fall I have lit a leaf intentionally and dropped it to he ground and the leaf burns out without catching anything else. Your best shot would be to get your kindling all together, dried and knock the cherry into it, then start blowing on it like you were trying to start a camp fire. Wood doesn’t ignite till about 600F/300+C or so if it isn’t a continuous heat. (Assuming it’s dry). A cigarette burns at around 400F/200c unless someone is pulling on it, then temperature goes way up, which is why you’d want to blow on the cherry to get any kindling to catch.
Sidenote: I worked at a movie theater back in 2006 for a few years. At the end of the night we would throw away large amounts of popcorn. That stuff makes a great fire starter. It’s light, airflow around it is great, and because it has the oil on it it burns fairly hot and the fire tends to stick to kindle and such really well. I used to take a couple gallons or so and tie it to my backpack because it added hardly any weight, and you’d have a spare snack when drinking around the campfire after you get it going.
Thanks for that explanation! I also worked at a movie theater, we did have a couple fires that started at the popcorn machine, now I know why :)
I used to smoke and I would stamp it out, although I have never lived in a dry region. I have heard from several places that it is very, very easy to start a fire. A ember can travel hundreds of metres, a single spark could well ignite dry grass. The recent Cali wildfires had such embers taken with the wind, which was a cause of the rapid spread in the Palisades iirc.
Edit: report
Sometimes its not even so much the general dryness of the region, and more just about airflow. Even in relatively humid places, if it’s windy you can pretty easily have cigarette embers start a fire.
Dry regions are more dangerous once there is already a fire, because the ground is so dry. For example here in Colorado you really have to try to put out a fire. You cant just piss on it and walk away. Even if you put out the fire with a large amount of water, some of it can still burn hot under the ground for days afterwards.
The opposite end of the scale, where its humid but very windy, you are not going to have a fire burn underground for days. But you will have more chance of fire spreading quickly due to the wind. At that point its mostly about types of vegetation and whatnot. Some vegetation burns quick and easy, some do not
Probably the most likely place for someone to start a fire with a cigarette would be somewhere like the plains. Brush vegetation goes up pretty fast, and its generally a base level of windy all the time. Once when I was driving there were either chain sparks or a passenger throwing cigs out the window starting brush fires on the side of the road. We would see one, call it in, and then see another one 5 miles down the road, and then another
with embers flying an estimated two to three miles ahead of the established fire and in every direction
Wow never knew it could be so powerful. That’s like a cluster bomb of fire.
