I was camping the other day and realised that someone needs to speak up about fire safety while camping. Guess it’d better be me. My qualifications for this subject are that I’m a Guide leader of fourteen years’ standing, I was the fire marshall at my last job (and I wrote our fire procedures manual and our fire risk assessment) and technically I’m a bushcraft instructor. Fire is fun but fire is dangerous and you need to think about it when you’re camping.
Don’t go to bed and leave the campfire unattended
Honestly, this point is the reason I’m writing this entire post. The campsite had a communal campfire circle and my fellow campers lit their campfire, cooked their marshmallows, piled logs up – and then got bored, tired and/or cold and went off to bed and left it blazing.
You shouldn’t leave any fire unattended ever but if it’s big enough to roast Henry VIII’s Christmas ox, you need to use your eyes and brains and deal with that! On Saturday night there were five logs nearly as big as my torso and four logs bigger than my arm and flames nearly two feet high just minding its own business. Sure, I crept out of my tent and sat by it and sang campfire songs for a while but most people probably won’t have an unsociable fire-safety gremlin lurking nearby.
It’s quite easy to take care of. Leave a solid stick unburnt to use as a poker and shove all the wood apart. Of course, my campmates hadn’t left anything unburnt so I had to use my feet, and I was wearing sandals. Don’t kick campfires with sandalled feet! I mention it as a mark of despair, not as advice! Use your stick to push everything out of the centre, tip the logs over and spread it all out so nothing is touching and let it die down. It won’t take long. When nothing is in contact with anything else, all that concentrated heat becomes a lot less concentrated and it’ll begin to cool immediately. The flames will die down pretty quickly, the red-hot embers will start to pulse and then fade and gradually, the whole lot will begin to go white. At this point, you sprinkle some water over it. Don’t pour a bucket of water on – you’ll create a lot of steam and a sort of ashy glue and it’ll be harder to light the next night. Just sprinkle until it’s damp and cool. It’ll only take about ten minutes to get the fire to die back and not much longer to cool it.
I didn’t cool the fires I got left with, I left them glowing red. But I also stood watching them glowing red until only the very middle was glowing. It’s a purpose-built campfire circle, with a ring of large stones containing the fire and then a large gravel circle around the outside. I figured it was safe enough once there were no more leaping flames. If it didn’t have that outer gravel circle, I’d have watered it, though, and most campsites don’t have anything quite so deliberate so water it down if you’re in any doubt.
Don’t let your kids play in the fire
This one sounds so obvious but I sat in my tent’s porch and peered out, gremlin-style, and watched children standing on the stones around the fire, leaning over it, shouting “can I burn this?” and “I’m gonna burn this!”, deliberately setting marshmallows on fire (ok, kids and adults do that) and otherwise coming within inches of setting fire to themselves.
Kids do not have good judgement. As it turns out, the adults supervising them often don’t have good judgement either. Don’t let the kids play with the fire. Let them enjoy it but make sure they have the proper respect for it and that they keep a safe distance away.
Don’t empty hot ashes into vegetation
This one is actually inspired by an incident at work – we used to dispose of our archives via a tin bucket incinerator in the garden. Then someone tipped the ashes into the bushes and when I was locking up that night, I saw flames in the garden. And believe it or not, the boss mocked me for months because I dealt with a fire at work by calling the fire brigade. Sorry for not letting your company burn to the ground.
Ashes are hot. If they’ve cooled on the surface, they could well be very hot an inch or so down. It doesn’t take much for that heat to build, latch onto something dry and flammable and start a fire. Stir them up to bring the hot stuff to the surface to cool and when it’s safe, dispose of them somewhere safe, like a proper metal ash bin. Tipping them into the bushes is just a wildfire waiting to happen.
Don’t cook inside tents
Barbecues and camping stoves both. Obviously they’re a fire risk. Tents are highly flammable and they melt and you’re as good as dead if it catches fire while you’re inside. If it’s raining, you can get tarps or windbreakers or gazebos to cook outside but undercover safely, or you can take advantage of the local village pub.
The other thing about cooking indoors that people underestimate is the gas poisoning. Barbecues and camping stoves don’t burn as cleanly or efficiently as stoves built for your house and they produce carbon monoxide. Barbecues will keep doing it even after they’ve gone out. You don’t notice that out in the fresh air but in a confined space like a tent, assuming it doesn’t catch fire, you’ve just made yourself a carbon monoxide bubble and you won’t notice it’s killing you until you’re already dead. This turns up in the newspapers every summer. Here’s an excellent piece from 2015 on BBC News.
Don’t use citronella candles (or any candles) in a tent
I know mosquitos are annoying and I’ve heard that citronella candles will keep them away but please for the love of God, do not light candles inside your tent. A tiny candle flame will cause a massive tent fire every bit as quickly as an out-of-control barbecue will.
Put your gas stove on a solid surface
I cook over a tiny simple gas stove that screws into the top of a gas canister about the size of a Sports Direct mug. It’s the perfect size for someone who just wants to cook a small bowl of pasta or boil some water for hot chocolate. But when there’s a pot of water on top, the whole thing becomes very top-heavy and very unstable. Putting it on the grass outside my tent is virtually impossible.
But it all becomes a lot more stable if you’ve got a solid surface underneath. At one campsite there was a drain cover nearby. Sometimes there’s a bit of tarmac. I own a tiny folding table, about six inches off the ground. You still need to stay within arm’s reach because unexpected accidents do happen but it stands up a lot better than it did in the grass.
Do I need to add that if your gas stove falls over in the grass while lit it’s going to set fire to the grass and then probably to the entire campsite? Don’t let it fall over.
Dispose of used gas canisters safely
If you have large canisters, the sort that take two hands to lift, you can take them to garages and outdoor shops and have them refilled, or at least leave them behind in exchange for a new full one. If you have small canisters like mine, you can’t. Some campsites will have a place to leave used canisters and then it’s safe to make them someone else’s problem. If not, you’ll have to do it properly yourself.
Do not chuck it in the bin. Do not chuck it in the recycling. Do not pierce it or attempt to cut it up – it can make them explode even if you think it’s empty. Likewise with the recycling – when it gets to the recycling plant, it gets crushed. You put your gas canister in with your baked bean tins and suddenly your local tip is having the sort of huge black fire that involves every fire engine within fifty miles and a plume of smoke that gets everyone within two miles evacuated for a few days. Your local tip should have a proper gas canister area. Your local camping shop might also accept them for recycling or safe disposal, so ask there if there are issues with the tip.
Don’t use portable barbecues
I’m sure I’ve seen someone in the last couple of days whining that someone had bought a real barbecue when they could have bought a £2 portable one like everyone else. These things should be banned. They’re a fire hazard and a health hazard and they’re the bane of fire crews’ lives.
For a start, people dump them in bins before they’re properly cool and start bin fires. Dorset & Wiltshire Fire, my local lot, spend most of the summer on Bournemouth and Weymouth proms putting out bin fires.
Second, a lot of people take them into the great outdoors for picnics. They’re touching the ground, they’re often placed in the grass and they’re almost invariably the cause of summer heath fires around here. Here’s a piece from BBC News about the Wareham Forest fires of last year, which lasted weeks and were caused by portable barbecues.
If you want to have a barbecue, fair enough. But have it in a proper metal reusable barbecue at home or on your campsite or outside your Airbnb or wherever, not outside in the great outdoors and dispose of those ashes safely.