How much fire protection does a gun safe offer?

[444]

FWIW: in commercial buildings such as apartment buildings that share a common attic, the fire rated wall between units, designed to stop fire from spreading from unit to unit through the attic is.............dry wall. And this gets back to a lot of the stuff said in these threads: a fire rated wall, as the name implies, is rated to withstand so much heat for so long of a time. It isn't going to work miricles in a worst case scenario, but it also isn't a joke.

All materials have their limits. The heat shields on space craft have their limits. The materials used in the exhaust of a jet engine have their limits. If you exceed those limits and the material fails, that doesn't make it a joke and it doesn't mean you should just not have anything.

I would not say that the fire rating of a safe is a joke.

Nor would I say the theft protection of a common commercial gun safe is a joke. Just like I said in my original post: in every thread like this you get the people who post examples of house fires that burned the house to the ground and no attempt was made to fight the fire: therefore the fire rating of a safe is a joke. You get the stories of giving someone a half hour with power tools, or the tools to break up a concrete floor/pallet jack/truck to haul a safe..... so a safe isn't worthwhile.............. I personally don't think a lot of this has much to do with reality. And again, I do have some experience in this to speak from.

If you have a gun collection that is so extensive and valuable (and you let everybody know about it) that people are going to target your house, research how to defeat a safe, and bring along the tools to do it: hopefully you also are well insured. The rest of the 99.9% of gun owners who arn't going to be targeted by professional safe crackers will benefit greatly from owning a safe.

 

[JO JO]

I have a friend who had a house fire,
Guns kept in a modern gun safe although the safe did not catch fire the heat from the fire melted everything inside, gun finishing and stocks along with scopes ruined from the heat not the fire,
The best thing for fire and theft is good insurance plus a safe

 

[hdwhit]

444 wrote:
People in these threads tend to present absolute worst case scenarios and then declare that fire rated safes (or any kind of safe) are worthless.

I haven't seen that with this thread.

Safes that are not designed to offer protection in a fire offer no protection (beyond what might be afforded by any barrier, but it is not specifically "fire protection"). Safes that do have a fire rating offer a certain degree of protection, but are not designed to protect against a fire such as caused the damage in the OP. That is not the same thing as declaring a fire rated safe worthless.

And certainly nobody said that a safe was not something useful irrespective of any fire protection it offers.

 

[hdwhit]

Kell490 wrote:
NRA has insurance to cover your firearms for theft and fire quick use of their calculator $20k in gun cost $219 a year...

Check with the company who writes your homeowner's insurance. You may be able to add a rider to cover that loss for half what the NRA is asking.

 

[hdwhit]

reloadron wrote:
If I lived in Florida (and that is a big if) I would have had a hurricane room decades ago, I saw the movie Key Largo with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. I would also have a few generators....

For a storm that happens, on average, once a generation, why would you make that kind of investment?

 

[mikemyers]

All the feedback was overwhelming and very informative. I guess there's no place that is totally "safe". Between hurricanes (where I live), floods, fires, and earthquakes, not to mention potential wars, we're all on "borrowed time". I certainly don't have a safe that would survive, but I have lots of nosy neighbors who look over things, and I don't have enough "stuff" for people to want to target me.

I was thinking - people wrote that fire goes up, so things should be kept low in a house, but that's where flood waters can do the most damage, as in Houston. There's no way to "win", only to do the best you can.

 

[boom boom]

I'm not sure that an underground shelter wouldn't be viable for a fire survival situation (even in a firestorm situation). I seem to recall that a few manufacturers have been installing government approved fire shelters in the Australian outback for some time now... saw mention of it on a documentary not too long ago.

I'm no engineer, and I'd never bet my life on something like that, but it seems plausible. Earth is a fairly good insulator, and the heat from a fire tends to go up, not down. I imagine that a shelter with 4 feet of earth on top of it would probably do pretty darn good in a firestorm, assuming the access to it was underground and insulated by earth as well (like a tunnel access). This is an issue I've considered a number of times, not so much for zombie apocalypse fantasies, but for something as realistic as fire protection. Wild fires around here have been intense at times, and some people have died when their escape routes have been blocked.

The thing about firestorms is that they burn intensely, but also quickly. They use up the fuel much faster than a slow moving fire.

We're currently in the burbs, but looking to get back to the hills where this kind of stuff matters. My wife grew up in those hills, and lived through no less than 7 mandatory fire evacuations (fortunately none of the fires took her home).

Read up about the WWII firebombing at Dresden sometimes. Some people died from suffocation and not from the burn. Evacuation if able under the circumstances like the California firestorms is prudent.

There are technologies and techniques if you are building shelters that can withstand a firestorm and its consequences--consult old civil defense plans for atomic bomb shelters--you can find details in magazines and civil defense publications during the 50's and 60's.