We found out that under certain conditions, a tiki torch will not only burn as it's intended to...but will burn to the ground.
Here's what happened: I went, as normally scheduled, to The Hub college/singles fellowship at my church. We cooked out outdoors, along with having volleyball, cornhole, and a bunch of card tables.
In order to keep the bugs away, our college/singles pastor Pete brought out about 8 tiki torches. He set them up almost exactly as you would normally do and had Jared Rollins light them.
Note the words "almost exactly" in the above paragraph.
Inside of 20 minutes, one of the torches caught fire. And we're not talking about burning as they are supposed to.
We mean the outside of the torch caught ON FIRE.
Minutes later, a second caught on fire, close to Pete's Jeep. Our firefighter on scene moved that torch and we let it burn to the ground.
About 10 minutes after the second one caught fire, the first torch that caught fire began falling apart. Then a THIRD went flame on, and quickly burned to the ground, also scorching the grass within a 3 foot radius.
And, finally, about 20 minutes after the third began to burn...YEP - a FOURTH TORCH caught fire, and this too was allowed to burn itself out.
That turned out to be the very last one that would catch, as we put the rest out after that happened.
It's thought the torch wicks weren't prepared correctly, or something else happened.
Either way, we now know how a torch can catch fire, and burn to the ground.
I think we'll be looking for metal tiki torches after THAT fiasco.
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