eli5 : Why does water put out fire ?
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You may have learned at one point that fire needs three things to keep going: fuel, oxygen, and heat.
Water disrupts the second two. First, it smothers the fire and blocks oxygen gas from getting to it. This is also how putting out a fire with sand or a blanket works.
Second, water takes a lot of energy to heat up. When you dump a lot of liquid water onto a fire, the water absorbs a lot of heat as its temperature rises and even more as it boils and turns to vapor. This can pull enough heat out of the fire that there isn’t enough energy left to keep the combustion reaction going.
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