Friday, April 26, 2019
Missing the melting point
Via ZH, the company that was working on the roof of Notre Dame is denying the possibility that a worker's cigarette could have started the fire.
"We condemn it. But the fire started inside the building... so for company Le Bras this is not a hypothesis, it was not a cigarette butt that set Notre-Dame de Paris on fire," said Le Bras Frères spokesman Marc Eskenazi, who insisted that it would be impossible to set a log on fire with a cigarette butte. He also questioned how cigarette butts could have been found on the site.Logs aren't the problem because logs weren't the upper surface of the roof. The surface that would have been touched off first was lead. Lead melts at 600F. The tobacco in a cigarette is typically 900F. A solid wood beam starts to burn around 800F, so it could have been ignited, but that's not the point. Wood wasn't exposed. Lead was. You could see the order of burning in the videos. The lead sheets melted first, leaving the oak rafters in place for a while. Finally the oak burned. Even so, it would take more than one cigarette to get the whole thing started. Perhaps there was a pileup of leaves in a crevice or angle of the roof, and the cigarette started the leaves. I still doubt it. I'm still betting that flammable GREEN insulation like polyisocyanurate (aka ROCKET FUEL) was the major igniter or spreader.
Labels: Asked and properly answered, Carbon Cult
¶ 1:44 AM
