Posts Tagged ‘source’
Diabetes Break-Thru Helps Battle Blood Sugar Woes
Are you a diabetic? If so, you are definitely not alone. Recent numbers report that there are some 18 million Type 2 diabetics. The American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists released statistics at it’s annual meeting suggesting two-thirds of Type 2 diabetics don’t have their blood sugar under control.
What may be even more astonishing, an additional 41 million have what is known as pre-diabetes, a precursor to the full blown disease.
Public health experts believe diabetes will be the next great lifestyle disease epidemic to afflict the United States. A study by doctors from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently startled people with the finding that the prevalence of diagnosed cases of diabetes had increased 33% over the past eight years.
Do you have a friend or family member with diabetes? If you have not been diagnosed as a diabetic, are you perhaps one of the millions that are undiagnosed? The following are some warning signs to look for:
- Frequent urination
– Unusual thirst
– Extreme hunger
– Extreme fatigue
– Irritability
– Frequent infections
– Blurred vision
– Cuts / bruises that are slow to heal
– Tingling / numbness in the hands and feet
– Recurring skin, gum or bladder infections
There are two primary reasons for Diabetes, 1) A prolonged diet high in carbohydrates and 2) Improper and under nourishment. Today, most people with diabetes are only treating the symptoms and not getting to the root of the problem. Furthermore, most medications given to diabetics are compounding problems instead of getting to the source. The best way to manage Diabetes is to get to the root causes.
Diabetics can help protect themselves by changing their daily routine. Although doctors have stated that there is no cure for diabetes, the following is recommended:
- Exercise
– Reducing sugar consumption
– Improved nutrition
– Nutritional supplementation
A 13 year old company named Sportron International has developed a “Diabetic Pack” that is nutritionally supporting today’s crisis with dramatic results. World renown nutritionist, Dr. W. Alan Tomlinson recently said, “Sportron’s Diabetic Pack is the most advanced nutritional support available and has been scientifically developed to intervene and assist in cases of abnormal sugar metabolism.”
The bottom line is that Diabetes has become a national epidemic. In an effort to assist Diabetics, there is a Weekly Diabetic Support Call with Live Q & A session Thursdays 8:30 EST 212-990-8000 passcode 9902# . This is not a sales call, it is a support call. provide a weekly environment where people can build relationships, feel cared about, share their ideas and ask questions… sort of a “radio talk show format”… very relaxed, impromptu and therefore always different each week. To learn more, you may visit www.diabetesmatrix.com.
Troy Simon
http://www.diabetesmatrix.com
1-888-348-8202
Lets Not Forget About The Little Guy
Every business has to start somewhere. What truly makes this country great is the freedom of enterprenuership that every one of its citizens have. Capitalism at its best signifies the power of a single person to reach monumental goals and turning a simple idea into a huge corporation. But in our pursuit of this glorified state, have we snubbed the little guy?
Corporate earnings are billions of dollars a year for executives and shareholders. Online companies such as eBay, PayPal, Google, and Blockbuster have crushed the little guy beneath the giant wheels of change. What would have been important to the small companies as they used to be is a far cry from the values that these corporations embrace today. Will it always be this way? Change is inevitable, but does it really take stepping all on the individuals that got them there in order to succeed? It’s as if once a certain dollar amount is reached in net revenue, the blinders go on, and the company loses touch with the little guy.
EBay, Inc. began in 1995 with one little guy’s idea on a better way to garage sale, as a way for his girlfriend (now his wife) to trade Pez dispensers online. By 2001, more than $9 billion in merchandise was sold via the auction monster. Now, eBay Inc. is the biggest internet marketplace, reporting a gross profit of $2,656,894 for 2004.
In an interview with eBay’s founder Pierre Omidyar in BusinessWeek Magazine, Senior Correspondent Robert D. Hoff asks a pertinent question:
Hof: “It seems ironic that eBay started out intending to level the playing field for small businesses and individuals, and now eBay is a big corporation. How do you make those jibe these days?” Omidyar: “It sure is ironic. I like to think we’re a different kind of big company, because of the way we interact with our community. If we lose that, we’ve pretty much lost everything. If you’re starting a revolution and you succeed, then are you still a revolutionary? It’s a little bit weird, but I think we still have a long way to go, bringing the level playing field to the rest of the world.”
Interestingly, earlier in the interview, Omidyar touts his original ideals of listening to his customers, and shaping the software based on their suggestions, sometimes even the same night he received an email from a customer. But increasingly, as of late, eBay’s customers are reporting a greater dissatisfaction with the way the conglomerate is handling their marketplace. After all, it is eBay sellers that are the actual customers, because they pay all the fees, and therefore are the source of eBay’s revenue. And unless you are a Power Seller, forget about calling eBay. Their number is reserved for only the elite few who can meet their standards of maintaining so many thousands of dollars in sales per month. You’ll be lucky if they respond to your email within a week. So I wonder what makes a level playing field, as Omidyar so aptly puts it. Can eBay truly claim to not have reached it yet? Come on?
Since the company raised its prices to sellers earlier this year, though, there are defections to Overstock, Yahoo, Amazon, and other smaller auction sites. Is eBay in that much financial distress that it has to rob the sellers of their hard earned auction profits only to pay higher fees? By the looks of the profits listed earlier, we can all see they’re not struggling. According to BusinessWeek’s David Kiley:
“Ebay’s stock is trading at almost half its 52-week high despite continuing to make money. One wonders if eBay has simply become as complacent as General Motors became in the 1980s, figuring that Toyota and Honda would never amount to much, and that people would prefer a used Buick to a new Hyundai. Ebay is still a market share leader by a big margin. But investors and Wall Street tend to value a stock based on what they think future performance will be. Looks pretty bleak.”
Tiffany & Co., which has filed a lawsuit against the Internet auction giant for facilitating counterfeits, claims that eBay has a responsibility to police its auctions. Gucci, Prada, and other big names are closely watching the suit, as the ramifications will affect them as well. Originally clinging to the values of Omidyar himself, policing auctions was indeed something that they did. Now, the complacency of eBay and it’s “hands off” attitude is almost disgusting. Big mistake; the stakes are high for eBay. Other firms are watching and legal experts predict a flood of similar copyright lawsuits if Tiffany prevails. Lawyers salivate at the thought of getting a piece of the eBay pie.
“Everybody wants to see where this is going,” said Lou Ederer, an intellectual property rights expert. “How much longer can eBay hide behind their bigness? They are taking the position that they can’t monitor thousands of auctions going on all at once. But where do you draw the line? Firearms, alcohol? There are certain industries where the line has to be drawn.”
Another giant, Google, is seemingly only a bit better. Google’s search engine does not generate revenue, as there are no paid inclusions to be listed in the search engine. Rather, Google relies upon its infamous PageRank to rate the importance of sites, and how they get listed. Factors such as keyword density and placement, aging, and link popularity all figure in to the secret algorithm, called PageRank. So where does Google make its money? Google’s pay-per-click advertising, AdWords, is the major source of Google’s income. Google’s concept started in 1996 with two little guys, Larry Page and Sergy Brin. While students at Stanford University, the pair collaborated on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the “back links” pointing to a given website. Housed with low end computers in a meager dorm room, the two college students originally sought a buyer for their technology, but no one was interested, so they decided to give it a go themselves. They got a few investors, and Google, Inc. was born. What had been a college research project was now a real company offering a service that was in great demand. The rest is history.
Now, with Google’s enormous impact on the internet, considering that 85% of all website traffic comes from search engines, people cannot fail to take notice. If your website doesn’t appear in Google, chances are you’re not getting good quality traffic. Google ranks #3, surpassed only by Yahoo and MSN, #1 and #2 respectively. Further, the corporation seeks to match its closest competitors by moving away from search engine technology and into the fields of web-based email, shopping, local searching, blogging, and even home pages, in order to steal that market share as well. When is it enough? That’s the funny thing about greed–it engenders more greed, and procreates like a bunch of rabbits.
But the search engine giant is in trouble in the courts, having lost one lawsuit already to Louis Vuitton, Inc. for trademark infringement in October, 2003, and another that the Versailles Court of Appeals, upholding the Vuitton decision, published in March, 2005. The court ordered Google to stop allowing the linking of advertisements to search terms trademarked by two travel companies by Google’s AdWords and to pay damages to the trademarked companies. According to CNN.com, “?The 20-page October 13 ruling by the court in the Paris suburb of Nanterre called into question the legality of the search system at the heart of Google’s business model.” The lawsuit will have ramifications on the validity of the pay per click advertisements, calling Google’s main source of revenue onto the carpet as more court cases ensue.
Google is in the process of removing French news agency Agence France Presse (AFP) from its Google News service, which aggregates links to online articles and accompanying photos from about 4500 news outlets. AFP sued Mountain View, California-based Google in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in March, 2005. The news agency is seeking to recover damages of at least $17.5 million from Google. AFP also asks the court to forbid Google from including its content in Google News. And the greed continues.
In other news, Blockbuster’s CEO John Antioco was ousted at the May 11th, 2005, shareholder meeting, only to reinstated to CEO two weeks later by the board when the dissident financier and corporate raider Carl Icahn voted himself onto the board, with voting rights of 10% of Blockbuster’s Class A shares, and 8% of Class B shares, only to find out that outing the chairman would cost the corporation $51 million dollars. The two other board members voted in actually had extensive media experience. The only experience Icahn has is buying shares and then being loudmouthed at shareholder meetings. So keeping Antioco on the board, and thus voiding the compensation package, seems like more of an afterthought, or even a fast recovery from what could have been a very costly second quarter. The way corporate America is set up seems to be a good way to be accountable (i.e. to the FCC and stockholders), but is a good idea for the ones with the most money making all the decisions? What’s laughable in the Blockbuster drama is that Icahn wasn’t privy to the executive contract that Antioco had, and once Icahn was informed after his election to the board, he quickly changed his tune.
Blockbuster, Inc. was founded by Wayne Huizenga, who was named Ernst & Young World Entrepreneur of the Year for 2004 and 2005. He is the only man to have created six NYSE companies, and three Fortune 500 companies: Waste Management, Inc., Blockbuster, Inc., and AutoNation. He started as a door to door salesman for a trash hauling company. From meager beginnings into the world of multi-billionaires, Huizenga’s is truly a Cinderella story, although his character wasn’t always pretty. And now Blockbuster stock is half of what it was a year ago, and keeps dropping. It seems for every mountain peak, there is the downhill slide.
What I hope to accomplish by this article is not stir up anger towards corporate America; quite to the contrary! What I actually hope to do is give each and every little guy out there the hope and light the fires of passion that you can be a success story as well. But there is a clear warning that growing beyond the bounds of reason has its consequences as well. If your goal is to gain enough wealth to be comfortable, then by all means, go for it. But if your design is to be the best, or to be all things to all people, there is fair risk to you of replacement.
Are American corporations getting too big for their britches and forgetting their roots? You bet. So hey, America, stop forgetting the little guys that made you great in the first place! The little guys like you and me, enterpreneurs with one goal in mind: to make a living, can make a difference. After all, it only takes one to rock the boat.
Jennifer E. Sullivan is an Internet Business Consultant who specializes in search engine optimization and web marketing. Her emphasis is on small to medium business marketing. She has written several web marketing articles, including “Hiring an SEO Consultant: 10 Reasons Why You Should”, “PageRank for Websites: Is There More to the Web?” and “Success for the Early Entrepreneur”. You can find more information on her services at http://www.firstclass-seo.com
Taking Charge and Getting Results: The Choice is Yours
As one of the most successful direct sales entrepreneurs in the industry, I have found there are two kinds of people in the world, those who would like success and those who are serious about success. There really is no in between. Think about it. Everyone wants success in their life; they want to make more money, have more time, have less stress and really make their mark in the world. The people who actually do it are the people who will not accept any alternatives.
For most people, it is easier to blame circumstance, adversity, their childhood, lack of status, job, boss, family, spouse, etc. etc. for their results. For some, the source of blame is luck. “If only I were luckier”, they cry again and again, always playing victim to some unseen force. Those who have massive success, however, have decided to take full control over their lives and to be personally responsible for their results. Yes, I said, personally responsible – for the good and the bad. They recognize their errors and mistakes and revel in the glory of their wins and accomplishments.
You see, it can not be one or the other. The key to taking control of your destiny and your results is to become a person of responsibility. Meaning, you recognize in your life that you are responsible, and have always been responsible, for the outcome. In doing so, there is a tremendous amount of freedom and peace. Not only do you realize that in being responsible are you in control, but you are no longer victim to circumstance, other people or chance. You have the opportunity to create your results. Win or lose, it is completely up to you.
Napolean Hill, author of Thank and Grow Rich, ingeniously stated, “Every adversity, every failure and every headache carries with it the Seed of an equivalent or a greater Benefit.” Accepting full responsibility for our results allows us to become creative, dynamic and focused on exactly what we want, not what we don’t want. We recognize success in our failures, learn from our mistakes and move proactively on. The person who is personally responsible is solution-focused and empowered.
Consider this example. Two people both start restaurants in the same town (Owner A & Owner B). They specialize in the same type of cuisine, have equally beneficial locations and the same amount of business/restaurant experience.
After 6 months of business, Owner A & Owner B both find themselves at a crossroads. Business has not been as successful as they had hoped and both are facing dire financial situations. As a professional business consultant to meet with both owners and you have the following experience:
Owner A spends most of the meeting complaining about the stingy customers, the lack of traffic, the vendors he uses, the quality of his staff. You here is openly criticize one of his waitstaff. You can feel the stress in the air and the staff seem frustrated and nervous. Owner A goes on and on about the tradegy of his business and tells you he plans to file for bankrupcy in two months if you don’t help him. You ask Owner A for his proposed solution and he puts it on you, asking if you can save his business.
Owner B spends most of his time praising his staff and customers. The waitstaff is friendly and smiling and everyone is eager to be at the establishment. The owner tells you he recognized that, while he has a great establishment, he will require improvement to grow. He tells you he should have hired a marketing consultant in the beginning but thought he could do it on his own. He recognizes that to grow his business, he will have to bring more customers into the door and have their experience be so great they will want to come back as repeat customers. He shares his ideas with you and asks for your input, letting you know that he is committed to creating a great dining experience and a flourishing business.
After 12 months, who do you believe would still be in business and who would you be eager to assist? Obviously Owner B. Owner B realizes he has made some mistakes and he has taken full responsibility for them. By doing so, he has recognized where he can improve and has asked for your assistance for guidance and direction, rather than seeing you as the lifesaver that will keep him from drowning.
Taking control of our results is a direct result of accepting responsibility. There is power in knowing what we achieve, or don’t achieve, is a direct result of the actions we take. In this is there is freedom and the reality that we can truly achieve whatever it is we focus on. As Napolean Hill said in Think and Grow Rich, “Anything the mind of a man can conceive and believe, he can achieve.” The choice is yours.
To your success!
Shannon Lavenia
Shannon Lavenia rose from being a high school Biology teacher to being a million dollar earner in the diret sales industry in less than 2 years. She now teaches people how to be successful in home-based direct sales by following the simple system she teaches. For more information, e-mail her at unlimitedfreedom@earthlink.net or vist her site at http://www.trueprosperitynow.com
Fundraising Letters: Where To Find Creative Ideas For Your Appeals
How do you make your fundraising letters creative and fresh year after year when your needs don’t change all that much? I am not talking about new initiatives. I’m talking about the programs that you run year after year. The membership drive that you run year after year. The funds that you must raise to cover administrative expenses and salaries year after year. How can you request funds for these things over time without boring your donors into apathy? Learn a lesson from Jack Foster.
Jack Foster spent 35 years working in creative departments of advertising agencies in the United States. One of his challenges was doing the advertising for Smokey Bear. Here’s how he describes his predicament:
The first thing the writers and art directors had to do every year was come up with a basic poster.
The rules for the poster never varied: It had to be a certain shape and size; it had to feature Smokey; it had to be simple enough to grasp at a glance, clear enough for even a dunce to understand, and (if it had words) brief enough to be read in three or four seconds.
The mission of the poster never varied either: It had to convince people to be careful with fire.
In other words, every year we had to come up with the same thing only different.
And we did. Indeed, every year we came up with 20 of 30 different ideas for posters. Every year. For over 20 years. Over 500 posters, all featuring Smokey and all trying to do the same thing and not a one of them the same.
I faced similar challenges when I worked at advertising agencies as a copywriter, and as a freelance copywriter for direct response agencies that create fundraising letters for international non-profits. The work was tough, but I discovered that writers and art directors could indeed create original fundraising appeals year after year for the same clients who needed money for the same things.
Here are some lessons I learned along the way, tips that will help you present your case for support to your donors in creative ways over time. The secret is knowing where to look for ideas. Here’s where I look.
Challenges in the field
One place to look for original ideas is the field. If your charity is involved with child welfare, then your “field” may be the homes of your foster parents. If you are a small but international humanitarian organization, then the “field” for you is the towns and villages where you operate overseas. As you sit down to create a brand new appeal letter, look to your field and ask yourself what challenges you are facing. These challenges can often be translated into a compelling ask. Let me give you an example.
Doctors Without Borders is an international aid organization that sends volunteer doctors and nurses to places where no medical infrastructure exists, usually because of war or natural disasters. Since they never know where the next tsunami or civil war will strike, they need to have sufficient funds on hand at all times so they can respond quickly to a humanitarian crisis anywhere in the world. This means their fundraising letters must ask for funds for no particular emergency, but for emergencies in general. A tough challenge.
Doctors Without Borders has met this challenge year after year in creative ways. Here is just one. They realized that they often sent their volunteers into emergency situations that were created by water. Either there was a flood or there was a drought. Either there was too much water or not enough. In a brilliant move, Doctors Without Borders crafted an original fundraising package that presented this global need. They told their story in such a way that the need was obviously great, though not necessarily looming.
Donors who received the appeal understood that Doctors Without Borders needed funds on hand to meet the challenge of floods or droughts at anytime. But they also understood that their gift to the organization might be used to help victims of a cholera epidemic, or people displaced by a civil war. By looking to a challenge faced in the field, Doctors Without Borders created a memorable fundraising letter campaign that did nothing more than raise money for their general fund in a novel way.
Your frontline staff
Another source of creative ideas for fundraising letters is your staff, particularly those at the front lines of your ministry. The men and women who carry out your work face to face with the public have dozens of stories to tell about the needs that your organization meets and the people it helps. Many of these needs can be translated into an appeal, not for a special project, but a request for general funds to meet a given need. Here’s an example.
In talking with the staff of a ministry that works with inmates in Canada’s prisons, I discovered that most inmates have a problem with anger. Their tempers often land them in prison. And, while inside, they grow even more angry. As you can imagine, a compelling theme for an appeal letter would be inmate anger, and how a donor’s gift supplies the funds that this prison ministry needs to help inmates conquer their anger and lead productive lives upon release.
Milestones
Is your organization celebrating a 10th or 100th anniversary? Then you have the ingredients for a compelling appeal, provided you link past successes with your plans for the coming months and years. Have you just served your millionth meal? Or planted 500,000 trees as of this week? Translate your milestones into compelling proof that your organization needs your donors’ continued support, then put your proof on paper in the form of a persuasive fundraising package theme and mail it.
Recent successes
Similar to milestones are recent successes. One organization I wrote for won the Nobel Peace Prize. That became a theme for one mailing. Another organization I know of retired their debt early, and announced the fact with an appeal for funds.
The key to keeping your fundraising letters engaging and a joy to read with each passing year is to present your work in new ways. As Foster put it, “to come up with the same thing only different.” And the best places to look for those creative ideas are your clients, volunteers and staff, and the challenges they face each day in carrying out your mission.
About the author
Alan Sharpe is a professional fundraising letter writer who helps non-profits raise funds, build relationships and retain loyal donors using creative fundraising letters. Learn more about his services, view free sample fundraising letters, and sign up for free weekly tips like this at http://www.fundraisingletters.org.
© 2005 Sharpe Copy Inc. You may reprint this article online and in print provided the links remain live and the content remains unaltered (including the “About the author” message).
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Home Fire Prevention Effectiveness 1
Are you aware that you can lose all your personal belongings in a single fire?
It’s very sad when fire strikes your home. You lose everything. You do not have a chance to save many belongings. You will be considered lucky if you escape with your life.
A person’s home is a very private piece of his or her existence. People have been known to struggle for their entire life just to accumulate sufficient material riches and built comfortable shelters for themselves. We can experience a tremendous sense of loss if our homes have been razed to the ground by a fire.
Fires know no bounds. We hear so much of this happening in the news. Small children and aged persons getting trapped inside while a house is on fire. We see live footage on television showing people jumping out from 3-storey buildings and getting injured. We see the terror in their eyes as they make a desperate effort to avoid being burnt alive.
We come across stories of people being suffocated by the thick smoke from a fire.
Death, injury and material loss is the result of fires in homes. It is a matter for everyone to take seriously.
Yes, the home is as safe as you make it to be – if you take steps to prevent fires from occurring in the first place.
Fire can also be a friend or a foe to mankind. Fires have been used for keeping warm, for cooking, for lighting, and so on. If it were not for the discovery and utilization of fire, mankind will have a very hard time surviving in the cold reaches of the Earth. Our early ancestors used fires to ward away wild animals.
Food tastes better when cooked or warmed up on a fire. Farmers clearing fields of weeds have also used fire. Many scientific discoveries are obtained by using the heat from fires.
Internal combustion engines, steam boilers, make use of engineering principles of combustion. Engineers and scientists have studied how to harness the heat from fires for energy generation.
Fire is a true friend if you know how to use it well. The benefits to mankind are many. Sometimes we forget that it can also be very dangerous.
There is a saying, “It takes a tree to produce one million matches, but it takes a match to destroy a million trees”. That’s the power of a fire. It can also destroy tremendously. It can go out of control. Efforts must be made to tame it.
There should not be any doubt in the minds of people. Fire is a boon to mankind. But it needs to be controlled well in order to use it.
People who makes use of fire, (that includes all of us), must know the nature of a fire, and how a fire can start. It is a fundamental rule to understand what we are dealing with.
In order for us to use fire properly, we should know something about how a fire can occur. People who have a natural fear of fire usually do not know much about fires. If they know how a fire can start, they will not fear it as much, but rather treat it with respect. The more you find out about fires, the better you will be at preventing it from going out of hand.
Starting a Fire
How a fire can start?
In order for a fire to start, three conditions must be met, and they must be present together. The conditions are heat, fuel, and oxygen. If you take any one of them away, a fire will not occur. It is called the “Fire Triangle”.
The Fire Triangle principle is used in all fire prevention and fire fighting measures. It is very simple. Remove any one of the three, and you will not have a fire. Put all of them together and you will have a fire or even an explosion. An explosion is just a rapid burning of a fire.
The three components of a Fire Triangle are heat, fuel and oxygen. The components can appear in many forms and it important for those of us who want to adopt fire prevention measures to look carefully.
Sometimes, people do not realize that all the three are present until it becomes too late. For example, a tiny electrical spark that can become a source of heat often cannot be seen at all. Sometimes, even when the three conditions are present, the energy of the heat may not be sufficient to cause a fire.
As with all accidents, when nothing terrible happens, people tend to get careless. Why worry? It did not happen the last time, it will not happen now. What they do not realize is that sometimes there is not sufficient heat to vaporize the fuel.
And fuel does not have to be petrol or kerosene. A piece of wood is combustible when it becomes heated enough. Cloth and paper are also fuels for a fire. The plastic chair in your dining room can be a fuel. In fact all organic materials can burn if it is hot enough.
Oxygen is always present in our atmosphere. In fact we thrive on the oxygen in the air to live. Oxygen occupies about 21 percent by volume in air, the rest being nitrogen. So in normal conditions, this part of the Fire Triangle will always be present and is very difficult to avoid having when we plan our fire prevention measures in our homes. It will be more relevant when we want to stop a fire that has already started. In this case, one of the ways to break the Fire Triangle is to remove oxygen. There are ways to do this, one of them is by blanketing or smoldering.
However, in our planning for fire prevention, we can look at ways of reducing the chances of oxygen rich atmosphere forming anywhere around the fuel and the heat. This has been known to start fires rapidly.
Everybody knows that heating can cause fires. However, we must not be unduly alarmed if there are sources of heat around us. We simply cannot avoid the heat. In fact we use heating for our own benefit. Simply put, we must treat heat and fire with respect. We should also study the mechanism of a fire.
The Mechanism of Starting a Fire
If you put the flame of a lighted match under a piece of wood, you can be sure that most of the time the wood will not catch fire. Even if you dip a lighted cigarette into a pan of lubrication oil, it is very unlikely that the pan of oil will catch fire.
So how does a fire actually start?
To answer this question, we must know how a fuel burns. A piece of wood can be considered a fuel. The carpet fabric on the floor of your house is also a fuel. But why does some fuel burn so easily while others do not? How does a fuel burn?
Taking a piece of wood as an example, below is the sequence of events that happen when a fire occurs.
· First, there must be a source of heat, a combustible or fuel present, and sufficient oxygen. (Remember the Fire Triangle)
· Next, the source of heat, like a naked flame, must meet with the combustible for a certain amount of time.
· The combustible must be able to absorb a considerable amount of heat from the heat source in order to decompose. Combustibles that can burn are usually organic compounds containing carbon. When the heat reaches the combustible, the latter will give off gases due to the decomposition of its material structure. Some of these gases are combustibles themselves. Water vapor may also be given off.
· The wood becomes drier and drier. The gases given off by the decomposition of the wood will catch fire by themselves. The heated wood keeps on giving out combustible gases as long as it is heated.
· With the additional heat given off from the burning of the gases in the wood, the heat becomes more intense. More parts of the wood are heated, and more combustible gases emerge. The fire keeps getting bigger and bigger until the whole piece of wood is consumed.
· If this bigger source of heat from the burning of the piece of wood is able to contact other combustibles, then the fire will spread to the whole house or building.
Looking at the Sources of Heat and Fuel
The obvious sources of heat are electrical heaters, electrical light bulbs, ovens, open flames of the gas stove, electrical sparking, friction caused by rubbing, and so on.
Those that are not obvious are often the things that will cause accidental fires. Electrical wiring is one of them. A good practice for the home is to check the electrical wiring conditions. This is especially so for old houses. The insulation of old wiring and components usually deteriorates with age, and contacts with dust, oil and moisture in the environment. Some may have already cracked, exposing the bare metal parts to the environment. Electrical conductors do become corroded and contacts can become loose. This can cause sparking and overheating.
Sometimes, a fire is burning at its correct place, for example, at a stove. If there is an accidental spillage of the fuel somewhere, it can cause the flame to spread to another place. LPG hose leaks can cause a fire from the gas stove to spread to the hose and the surrounding furniture. Leaking kerosene stove with dripping kerosene can cause the fire from the stove to spread to the table or the floor. Sometimes accidental breakage of a bottle of a spirit lamp may splash the fuel all around and cause a fire to spread rapidly.
Accidents like these do happen, but they can still be avoided.
None of these fires can occur if there is no fuel to catch fire. Careful segregation of the heat from the fuel will ensure that the fires will not spread. Even if it were to start, it will not be sufficient for the fire to spread. When dealing with open fires like these, it is essential that no other combustible materials be nearby. So even if there is an accidental spillage, the effects could be minimized.
The presence of a rich oxygen source can often cause a spontaneous fire. Chemicals like potassium permanganate, hydrogen peroxide can produce oxygen under certain conditions. These chemicals are often kept in homes for medical purposes. Sometimes oily rags throw around the place can catch fire by themselves because of chemical reactions.
Storage of chemicals must be controlled because mixing of certain chemicals sometimes produces heat. Storage of paint, thinner, turpentine, methylated spirit and other solvents must also be well controlled. It is good to be aware of the chemicals we use around the house. Nail polish, lighter fluid, aerosol for paint or insecticide may contain very volatile inflammable materials.
Aerosols must be used carefully. Small particles are easily combustible. Even organic powders can be dangerous. A bowl of flour is very safe by itself, but if the powder is allowed to be blown in air to form a haze, it can be easily ignited if there is a source of heat.
The sun can also produce a tremendous amount of heat. We experience this when we step into a car exposed to the afternoon sun. It may just need a small quantity of extra heat to start a fire.
Looking around for ways of reducing the chances of oxygen-rich atmosphere forming anywhere around the fuel and the heat can help a lot in preventing unwanted fires from happening. However, sometimes it is the unexpected that causes fires…
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Many years of working experience in Marine, Facilities, Construction has given the author material for writing e-books and articles related to engineering, and management. Subscribe to facworld ezine More information at Marine Engineer and M & E Engineer
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