Firefighters are heroes. Especially when they have to deal with unusual calls like, say, for example, spontaneously combusting tortilla chips. Which is exactly what the Austin Fire Department had to do last week. And yes, you read that correctly: Spontaneously. Combusting. Tortilla chips.
Apparently, tortilla chips can burst into flame, at least under certain conditions, which is what the Austin Fire Department was called to handle.
According to the post of the Austin Fire Department's Facebook page, the tortilla chip factory was working on a new way to dispose of the waste from tortilla chips. Pallets of boxes with the food waste caught on fire spontaneously; fortunately, all of them were outside the factory. (It's not clear what kind of tortilla waste catches fire, and we're not sure if we think it should be Mythbusters or Mulder and Scully that look into this occurrence.)
The fire department said that large cardboard boxes filled with the food waste continued to catch on fire while they were there on site. And then "adding insult to injury," the firefighters were called back to the factory three days later when another set of boxes filled with food waste also caught on fire.
Since there were additional crates of the food waste that hadn't yet gone up in flames, the firefighters decided better safe than sorry. They "drowned all of the other crates that had yet to burn, thereby eliminating the risk completely."
The fire department noted that the only damage was to the cardboard boxes containing the food waste; since all the pallets were located on the exterior of the building, the factory itself was not harmed.
We're sure that the tortilla chips in your house are safe, but just in case, thank a firefighter next time you see them.
Read the whole the Facebook post:
