From what I understand, the fire at the source of the movies tension was caused by an oil rig exploding. I really don’t understand how poorly sealed dynamite with its main explosive fuel source leaking would be effective enough to put out a raging fire. Seems completely counterintuitive.
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Fire needs fuel and oxygen to burn. A large, well-placed explosion can instantly burn up all of the available oxygen in an area, immediately snuffing out any fire.
When you blow out a candle the air that you are blowing still has a lot of oxygen in it. But the force is great enough to move the hot region where the oxidation is happening away from the fuel source, which causes it to go out.
An explosion causes the same thing on a much bigger scale.
We used similar tactics with oil wells during desert storm.
Large explosion consumes all the air feeding the oil well fire. fire cannot exist without oxygen so fire goes out
I loved that movie.
That said, given the incredible expense of not stopping the fire… couldn’t they just buy more dynamite from someplace? They didn’t need that much of it, and farmers use dynamite for tree stumps and stuff.
There’s no way the plan they ended up trying was the better option over just… buying a crate of new dynamite from someplace, right?
Larger fire takes up all the oxygen from the smaller fire like a big mean bully takes the candy from a little kid. The smaller fire cannot burn without oxygen, hence is extinguished
When you blow on a candle, you add a bunch of oxygen (which the fire needs to burn), but it doesn;t make the candle burn hotter, it makes it go out. Because the air you are adding is COLD air (compared to the fire). And if you add enough cold air all at once, it cools down the fire to the point it wont burn anymore (fire needs fuel, oxygen, and heat… youve removed enough heat to stop the fire).
Same thing with these explosions. They blow up, which consumes SOME of the oxygen near the fire, but more importanlty it MOVES a WHOLE lot of air. It’s like blowing on the burning oil well REALLY hard REALLY suddenly. This “blows out” the fire (cools it down sufficiently with enough cooler ambient air that the fire stops burning). Then you go in before it re-starts somehow, cap the oil well (or whatever the source of “fuel” was that was feeding the fire), and bob’s your uncle.
One of my favorite movies.
Now, as far as oil well fires, watch the movie “ Hellfighters”. It sucks , but will explain how the explosions work.
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