Fire Blankets

The Importance of Fire Blankets

It is advisable to have a fire blanket or two within easy reach for you to use in emergencies, especially in your kitchen and its surroundings. You can never tell when a kettle of boiling water spills over and causes the gas stove you are using to come up with flames unexplainably, and the flame spread all down to the floor. You have to do something quick to avert the fire’s spread to a larger area and cause more havoc. You can put out the blaze by spreading a fire blanket over the burning gas stove to put out the fire quickly. The fire blanket cuts off the oxygen supply to the fire thus putting it out. You must also have the presence of mind to switch off the gas stove’s fuel supply, so the fire can stop entirely.

A fire blankets are a sheet made of fire retardant material, which is a very handy item to use to put out a fire that is just starting. This could happen anytime in your kitchen and this is about the best tool to use in smothering an incipient fire short of using the fire extinguisher. Some would get rattled in incidents like these and use water to put out the blaze. But doing so would even increase the chance of the fire spreading to a larger area, especially if the flame comes from burning fuel from the gas tank. The best remedy for this kind of incident is to use a fire blanket, which is designed to put out fires by stopping the oxygen supply over the fire.

In case a person catches fire on his clothes, the better option to stop the fire is to wrap him quickly in a fire blanket, so there will no longer be oxygen to make the fire to continue to burn. Using water may not be as effective, since the person pouring on the water may also be so jittery that he cannot do it efficiently. The water can extinguish some portions of the fire hit by it, but other parts of the fire continue to burn and can cause the person on fire to have so many burns later. Wrapping him up in a fire blanket is a surer way of solving the problem.

A fire extinguishers may be more expensive, so you can perhaps afford only a unit or two of it. But you should not also neglect to have it in your house as it has a definite purpose different from that of the fire blanket – it is a firefighting tool that you use when the fire is already beyond the stage where you can still use a fire blanket.

The fire blankets are cheap enough so you can have several of them in other parts of your house so you can easily grab them in emergencies. They are normally folded in quick release containers for your convenience. It will be good however, if you can practice with one of these fire blankets to get some familiarity with how it is used. This can assure you that you will be able put out a starting fire when there is need for it.