Orange Fire Chief David Frenzel last week saw a photograph and “information” on the Internet about hand sanitizer bottles catching fire in a hot car in the summer.
“I didn’t understand how it could get that hot,” he said about the sanitizer.
Frenzel said he has carried a bottle of hand sanitizer for years in the console of his pickup truck. Occasionally the bottle swelled in the heat. “It never exploded. It never affected the hand sanitizer,” he said.
The Facebook post about hand sanitizers showed a burned area of the storage pocket on the side of driver’s door. Some fire departments across the country even shared the post, saying the alcohol in the sanitizer could catch fire spontaneously from the summer heat inside a car.
But, like many social media posts, it wasn’t true and accurate. The information received so much attention during the past week that the National Fire Protection Association made a special video and disseminated correct information.
Guy Colonna, director of technical services with NFPA, said the alcohol in hand sanitizer can catch fire with contact to a flame or an electrical spark. But a bottle of hand sanitizer cannot “ignite from heat alone independent of flames,” he said.
The temperature inside a vehicle in the summer sun can reach about 150 degrees Fahrenheit, though in Southeast Texas it may seem hotter.
Colonna said hand sanitizer would need to be heated to more than 700 degrees Fahrenheit to combust on its own. The alcohol in sanitizer might vaporize in a hot car, he said. However, the most harm the vapors would do is pop off the top of a bottle.
The pressure from the vapors was what swelled Frenzel’s hand sanitizer bottle.
People need to be careful using hand sanitizer near an open flame like a barbecue grill. Colonna said large quanities of stored hand sanitizer of more than five gallons need special precautions.
The bottle of hand sanitizer you keep in your SUV, though, is safe for the summer.
-Margaret Toal, KOGT-
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