You may consider your home fire-safe, but dangers lurk around your workbench, behind your walls, and right on your kitchen counter. Here's how to extinguish them
“The problem with sawdust is that it doesn’t look very dangerous,” says Tom Harned, a field manager for Liberty Mutual. Yet it burns quickly, much faster than other kinds of dust, which tend not to be as concentrated. If you don’t have a good dust-collection system, sawdust will accumulate on surfaces, where it can combust. Rule of thumb: If you have even an ultrathin layer of the stuff, you’re asking for trouble. Regularly use a vacuum designed specifically for combustible dust. And don’t use compressed air in a can to blow sawdust off surfaces: It can propel the dust into the air, where it can more easily ignite.
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