HOUSTON – A southeast Houston woman’s effort to spruce up her property went up in smoke after her mulch apparently caught fire.
Mavis Bolton had just spread a fresh layer of it on her flower bed, when she left to spend the night at her sister’s home.
Her next door neighbor noticed the fire.
“My neighbor in back rang the door bell and, and he said, ‘Do you know the fence is on fire?’” said Samuel Portales, who is also a neighbor.
By the time the fire department arrived, Portales had already put out the fire with a garden hose.
“I asked them what caused it,” said Portales. “He said, ‘I think the mulch did it, cause sometimes they got chemicals, and they react to something.”
Industry experts say the spontaneous combustion of mulch is extremely rare, but that it’s not unheard of under the right circumstances. It’s the result of a chain of chemical reactions that release heat at a self-accelerating pace.
Still, there are skeptics.
“Look at it this way. Almost all yards have mulch in them,” said Richard Stamper of Living Earth Mulch and Compost. “And if there was a real problem, we’d be having a lot of mulch fires. This case was very, very rare.”
