Very true. We've filled basements with water trying to get a stubborn fire on the 2nd floor out - it's a bit of a tough decision, because when you don't have enough crew for a salvage crew below, you will loose everything, so you try to save something.

We now use Foam - the last house fire we worked had a full knock-down of a well-involved crawl-space and some burn through the floor with only about 100 gallons of water/foam mix. Compare that to the 500 or more gallons we might have needed.

But if you have a fire, there will be a lot of damage, no matter what.

I have heard that, in the absence of a fire safe, putting items in the freezer provides some protection. After all, it is an insulated box (and in a fire, it starts out very cold). Is this a good idea? Will it work?

The best fire safe I have ever seen was a refrigerator freezer.
I have seen then burned up on the outside but the food was still intact on the inside.

One man I know, bought a chest type deep freezer, lined the bottom with collectible coins, put in an inch of water, froze that and repeated the action the next day,,and the next,,etc, until the freezer was full of his collectible coins, full of ice, impervious to theft and fire.

That's my $0.02 and I'm sticking to it!!!!!

Sorry, a little off-topic, and maybe discussed before:
once I was thinking of buying one of those heavy-ish plaster/gypsum-filled vinyl outside fire and waterproof safe boxes at Staples (I think it was the Sentry brand)--the kind with the key lock in front. Anyway, I was looking at one of the small-to-medium sized box models. Someone before me had thoughtfully conducted a little demo on the unit on the shelf. They had ripped the top off the safe from the back (hinge) side. I had always thought there must be a very strong metal rod or somesuch hinge on the back, however I was amazed to see that the "hinge" is composed only of two smallish plastic nubbins (for lack of a better word) that also appeared to be filled with the plaster material. Each nubbin fit in a corresponding socket that composed the other part of the hinge on the lower portion of the box. As I recall, the nubbins didn't appear to be more than a half to three-quarters of an inch long, and they had been completely fractured and bent when the top had been ripped off the safe from the hinge side. I was amazed to see such an apparently flimsy "hinge" for a box that supposedly was supposed to be somewhat difficult to open.

Again, sorry to drag this off the fireproof subject, but I thought those considering purchasing one of these units might be interested.

Although I am not familiar with the safe you describe, the hinges on a good safe should only function to hold the door on when it is open and to align it when it closes. All security should be a function of the geometry of the structural overlaps of mortices/ flange arrangements that engage as the door closes. Even so, one would like to see good hinges!

Great security, but poor accessability. Always a trade off. On the otherhand, if I'm a thief that has to have those coins, I'd take an axe to the ice and what does it matter if I damage 20% of the coins.

Sotto,

Many of those fire safes that you see in Staples or Office Depot are NOT safes, but fire rated security containers. They aren't inteded to protect against someone trying to break into it, but to protect the contents in a fire. They look secure, but really they're just gypsum boxes with a thin layer sheet metal covering, easily pried open with a prybar or broken with a hammer. Think of them as heavy duty ice chest, that's basically what they are. Even some of the mid-sized ones are still relatively easy to open with regular tools. That's why some safes are TL rated, to protect against this.

It wouldn't really help to heavily armor something that small, when the thief could just pick it up and walk off with it. I believe those containers are best kept inside a much larger, more secure safe to give added protection against heat, not used by themselves. As with any safe, you really need to have it bolted down or secured somehow. Anything less than about 300-400 lbs could easily be moved by a single person with a dolly.

"As with any safe, you really need to have it bolted down or secured somehow. "

Even heavy ones get stolen. A decade ago a thief heard a guy had a load of money in a large and heavy safe. He used a sledgehammer on the front door walked in with a logging chain, tied it around the safe, slipped it over his trailer hitch on the way out and took off in his truck. The safe missed the door a bit, took out a good bit of wall, and bounced along behind the truck until he got it to where he could open it. Where he used a torch and jackhammer to break into it.

He got about $50 and ten years in jail because the sheriff deputy followed the skid marks and divots dug out by the safe to the man's wrecking yard, with his name on the gate, and found the destroyed safe in plain view.

He was a bold and effective thief. But one that wasn't particularly smart about covering his tracks.

A lot of people have found the most cost-effective safe to be be one concreted into a slab. These are very difficult to remove and hard to break into if place in a tight spot. The safe is slightly below the slab so they enjoy a certain amount of protection from fire even without an actual fire rating. Their main weakness is that water might get down into the safe. Many of these units have rim that sticks above the floor several inches and that eliminates a lot of the danger from minor flooding.

If the fire dept fights the fire in your house, you can count on a certain of water flooding in any case, but it may be easier to put the contents into a waterproof [and thermal resistant?]container of some sort into the safe, rahter than to make the safe itself waterproof.

Jeff

> Also, consider off site back-up. Either on-line or by leaving
> cd's at your brothers house. Either is a fine way to preserve
> your docs.

I highly recommend off-site backups. Consider the disaster most likely in your area and pick a place not in your disaster zone. (_Big_ zone if you're in hurricane areas, smaller zone in tornado alley.) I'm on the West Coast and my brother is in Texas, so I'm happy to mail him CDs of stuff and expect it to survive my earthquake.

Archiving stuff online is worrisome, because I don't know if I'll have reasonable access after a big hurricane, but I do also maintain backups online on servers that I'm told are outside my area.