Clothes Dryer Explodes - Severe Burns Result

Bob Carroll

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Moving a clothes dryer slightly should not cause an explosion. It is simply outrageous that a woman has been severely burned in a gas explosion and fire when she turned her dryer on. Over years of use and maintenance every clothes dryer is going to be moved slightly on many occasions. Proper design or installation of the dryer would have prevented this horrible injury. Corrugated stainless steel tubing has been available on the market for many years.

From the local Channel 6 TV news account:

Woman Severely Burned When Clothes Dryer Explodes

DEERFIELD BEACH, Fla. -- A woman is in a local hospital with severe burns after the clothes dryer in her Deerfield Beach home exploded Sunday.

As natural gas is becoming more and more popular, fire safety experts say the number of fires will go up as well. Dryers are among the most dangerous things in the home.

The natural gas fueling a dryer inside the home exploded Sunday morning, sending the woman to a local hospital with severely burned legs.

Fire prevention chief Gary Fernaays said the dryer was moved slightly the day before, causing a tiny but potentially deadly kink in the pipe feeding into the dryer. All the woman did was turn the dryer on.

"Kicked it on. Boom. We had the ignition source," Fernaays said.

From AskTheBuilder.com:

Corrugated stainless steel tubing (CSST) - flexible stainless steel piping system that is installed like electrical wire. This material was approved for residential use in 1988 by the National Fuel Gas Code. It is an ingenious method of supplying natural gas to fireplaces, furnaces, cooktops, clothes dryers and any other gas appliance. Virtually all state and local code authorities permit its use

When you use CSST, you can minimize potential gas leaks. A typical black iron pipe installation has many 90 degree, tee and coupling fittings. These fittings are used each time you change directions or join two pieces of straight pipe together. Each of the cast fittings can be the source of a leak. What's more, the threaded joints on both sides of the fitting can also be potential leak points. Because the CSST snakes its way around bends and obstructions as one solid piece of tubing, you only have a fitting at each end of the line.