Turning a farolito into a mini-bomb
Or, how I spent early Christmas morning
One of my roles at Journal North is to cover Los Alamos National Laboratory. And since February 2014, I have been writing news articles on the aftermath of an accident at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant at Carlsbad that was caused by the lab.
I’ve come up with a sentence to quickly explain what happened. It goes: “A drum of radioactive waste that was improperly packed with a combustible mix at LANL breached, causing a shutdown of the nation’s nuclear waste storage facility.”
These days, to save space and avoid too much repetition, I seldom note the incident’s most bizarre detail — that the improper ingredient added to the drum was wheat-based kitty litter to absorb liquids, instead of the clay-
based litter that was supposed to be used. The Swheat Scoop brand litter reacted with nitrates and caused a chemical reaction that popped open the waste drum, spreading radioactive contamination.
It has been noted by critics of the nation’s pre-eminent nuclear weapons lab that any high school chemistry teacher would likely have known that organic material like wheat would react with the nitrates in the messy stuff that goes to WIPP.
Now the tables have turned. The smirk has been wiped off my face.
Over Christmas, I created my own combustible mix that caused a near-disastrous accident. I should have paid more attention to my own chemistry teacher.
Today, in this space, I present my mistake as a cautionary tale.
Our family follows the Santa Fe tradition of putting out farolitos along our driveway and the sidewalk on Christmas Eve. Part of our tradition is for our son, now an adult and visiting for Christmas, to head over to the nearby arroyo and shovel up a bucketful of sand to put into the paper sacks to anchor the farolitos.
This year, amid busy holiday preparations, a change was made in the interest of convenience and speed. We decided to use soil from the big pots in which I grow tomatoes over the summer instead of the sand.
It turns out that there’s this thing called Google that we should have used before altering our hallowed holiday customs.
Search for “potting soil” and “fire hazard,” and the third item from the top is a six-year-old news article headlined: “It is now so hot even the SOIL is catching fire: Home damaged in blaze caused by a bone-dry potted plant.”
From 2016, there’s: “Firefighters suspect potting soil as possible cause of Aurora deck fire.” There are numerous Google hits on the same theme.
From July, from Canada, comes “Potting soil emerging as a fire hazard.” This article begins, “In March, a massive fire destroyed a Calgary condominium complex, leaving at least 250 occupants homeless. The combustive culprit was a cigarette in a planter outside the complex. Recently there has been a spike in fires sparked by smoking materials in potting soil.”
The thing is that potting soil contains peat moss, which National Geographic describes as “the forgotten fossil fuel.” I’m one of those people who forgot. Peat moss isn’t much different from Swheat Scoop.
Potting soil also contains pellets of fertilizer, which everyone knows these days can be used to concoct improvised explosive devices. I’d even added some manure to my pots to boost my tomatoes a bit more — amplifying the mix with another forgotten fossil fuel.
An additional problem: My family ignored standard fire department warnings about letting farolitos burn overnight.
Long story short, at about 3 a.m., our Christmas visitors were not ol’ Santa and his reindeer. We had firefighters and emergency lights.
A neighbor who keeps late, or early, hours spotted the huge yucca plant in our front yard burning, with flames higher than our roof and called it in. Although no one woke us up via doorbell until the fire had been extinguished, the responding crew must have acted quickly, limiting the damage to the yucca, reduced to huge, charred stumps, and our car that was parked in the driveway.
The lead firefighter was great, and she spared us a wee-hours lecture on farolito safety.
Our car’s bumper was partially melted — they don’t make ‘em like they used to — as was the red plastic cover for the brake light. We considered ourselves lucky that the car didn’t blow up.
There has been no official confirmation of my eventual deduction that we had created a mini-bomb of peat moss, fertilizer and manure, ignited when a farolito candle burned down to the potting soil.
But a couple of other farolitos away from the burn site, and not near the vegetation ready to become fire fuel after months of hot and dry weather, had also been reduced to burned remains.
Fire Chief Erik Litzenberg said that he has never encountered a potting soil fire in Santa Fe.
“You might be the first person to admit what happened,” he said.
I have a bit more empathy now for those guys who packed that WIPP drum.
Just don’t let this happen to you.