I was listening to a storyteller on The Moth Radio Hour yesterday who was speaking about his experiences as a fire fighter. In the course of telling his tale, he spoke of the phrase "smoke is fuel" which very much caught my attention. I entered that phrase into Google.
The URL for the search result was probably the longest URL you can imagine but at the head of it all was the following text:
There is plenty more reading material waiting for you at that search result.
Because smoke generation is a process of incomplete combustion, that smoke is capable of sustaining further combustion. Smoke itself can ignite. If ignition happens while someone is enveloped in that smoke, that person can be immolated.
That person can be immediately burned to death.
Smoke inhalation is a widely known, a widely recognized cause of fire fatalities, but smoke immolation is I think less well understood by the general public.
If, heaven forbid, you are ever involved in a house fire or a workplace fire or any other fire disaster, please remember this and get yourself OUT of the area.
Your life will be at stake.