Larry G. Steward, Assistant Professor of Horticultural Industries Technologies, Agricultural Technical Institute, The Ohio State University, Wooster, Ohio; T.Davis Sydnor, Professor of Urban Forestry, School of Natural Resources, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio; and Bert Bishop, Senior Statistician, Computing and Statistical Services, Ohio Agricultural and Research and Development Center, The Ohio State University, Wooster, Ohio.
Mulches are commonly applied after shrubs and ground covers are planted in the landscape. Mulches are chosen for a variety of reasons including aesthetic appeal, color, price, organic content, nutrient content, reduction in weed competition, and dust abatement.
Many commercial and public facilities no longer allow smoking inside the facility as a result of today's laws and policies. Cigarette and cigar smokers often discard lighted smoking material, including lighted matches, into the landscaped areas as they enter the building. This results in the potential for mulch ignition. As people move from smoking areas outside the building to areas within, discarded cigarettes smolder and may set the mulch on fire. Mulch fires, besides destroying the landscape plant material, may place frame construction buildings at risk.
The risk of a mulch fire is, perhaps, more common than one might expect. The Ohio State University Agricultural Technical Institute (ATI) campus in Wooster, Ohio, had an incident in fall 2000 where smoldering mulch indicated a subsurface mulch fire (Garrod, 2000). In Columbus, Ohio, a mulch fire was credited with severely damaging a building (Narciso, 1997).
Scioto Dublin High School in Dublin, Ohio, was closed as a result of a mulch fire that contaminated the air handling system in the building (Sternberg, 1997). An improperly discarded cigarette ignited the landscape mulch and then spread into the crawl space beneath the structure, damaging a Brookhaven National Laboratory structure (Levesque, 2001).
Problems such as these have become enough of a nuisance at the University of Maryland for their Environmental and Safety Department to develop a Mulch Fire Standard Operating Procedure (Anonymous, 2002a).