Hot clothes left in the back seat of a car spontaneously combusted after being dried at a Warrnambool, Victoria, laundromat on Monday night, leaving the vehicle with smoke damage.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The Warrnambool fire brigade was called to reports of smoke inside the car on the corner of Lava and Banyan streets about 4.40pm.
Senior station officer David Black said the car owner had used a clothes dryer at a local laundromat and had put the warm clothing back into a basket on the back seat of the car.
Mr Black said the car owner had then left the vehicle unattended and when they returned found the clothes had started to smoulder, creating a large volume of smoke.
He said that there were no flames but the smoke damage was enough to blacken the window which had to be broken to quickly douse the smouldering clothing.
"If you heat up something hot enough, anything can burn," Mr Black said.
"It's not unheard of. Everything has an ignition point."
Mr Black said while it was unclear what caused the spontaneous combustion, it could have been something like oil on a tea towel.
He said he had attended one fire in Melbourne after a massage business had put washed towels that still had remnants of massage oil on them into the dryer and they caught fire in the boot of the car on the trip home.
Mr Black said the incident was a reminder to people that if clothes from the dryer were still hot, that they need to be aerated rather than packed down into a clothes basket.
