After deadly fire Pocono firefighters advise on safe disposal of ashes

The fire that killed five people at a Connecticut home early Christmas morning occurred after a homeowner's friend placed a bag filled with fireplace ash in a room reserved for shoes and coats. The home had no working smoke detectors.

Fire experts on Wednesday said that homeowners with fireplaces must be extra careful when disposing of hot fireplace ash because ash can ignite a fire if left next to a flammable surface. It's easy to assume that removed fireplace ash is no longer flammable when in fact it is.

"Just because you don't see embers glowing in the ashes, you don't know how much heat those ashes are holding," said Robert Palumbo, fire chief for Hemlock Farms Fire Company in Pike County.

Palumbo said that it takes 72 hours for ashes to fully cool and for the threat of their potentially starting a fire to be neutralized. He said fireplace ash should be placed in a metal container with a lid. After that's done, the container should be placed a safe distance away from the home.

"We've been to too many fires where people place a bag of ashes right on their porch, and then the next thing you know the wind kicks up , and then the whole porch is on fire," Palumbo said.

Ira Rosenblum, who owns A Sweeping Beauty Chimney Professionals in East Stroudsburg, said that gauging the temperature of ashes can be tricky because ash is a good insulator. If you put your hand over a pile of ashes you've removed from a fireplace and you feel no heat, it could still contain glowing embers.

If you leave hot ashes in the fireplace, make sure there's a metal screen or glass partition in place, fire officials said. And, of course, make sure you have working smoke detectors, they advised.

Winter is when most house fires occur in America, according to United States Fire Administration. About 40 percent of all fires in the U.S. between 2007 and 2009 were fireplace-related, the fire administration said.

About 192,700 of yearly residential fires spread beyond the source, and 6 percent of those fires are caused by hot embers or ashes, the Fire Safety Administration says.

And 15 percent of multiple-fatality fires are caused by unintentional or careless actions, the agency says. There are about 250 multiple-fatality fires in the U.S. each year, resulting in an estimated 825 deaths and 200 injuries.

In Stamford, fire officials say they believe Michael Borcina left a bag of hot fireplace ashes near the back of the house between 3 a.m. and 3:30 a.m. The fire that killed his friend's three children and their two grandparents was reported just after 4:40 a.m. Borcina and the mother, Madonna Badger, escaped the blaze after failed attempts to rescue her daughters.

Badger's three daughters, 10-year-old Lily and 7-year-old twins Grace and Sarah, and her parents, Lomer and Pauline Johnson, died amid frantic rescue attempts by Borcina, Badger and local firefighters.