Fire Tornado

[Jenn]

[erwins]

Looks plausible to me.

The Wiki page for Fire Whirls gives some info on what they are.

Here's a video that looks like it was shot at a science museum, showing the creation of a fire whirl under controlled conditions.

erwins

[Troberg]

Looks entirely reasonable.

You can make your own mini fire tornado from simple household items. It's safe, assuming you do it outdoors and take common sense precautions.

* Take a tall box, with a more or less quadratic footprint.
* Cut vertical slits in it, near the bottom. Make these slits near the corners, about where the tips of a swastika would be if you placed it flat on the bottom of the box.
* Place a bowl of methanol or other liquid which ignites easily and burns in a controlled way (ie not petrol!).
* Ignite it.

Air will be sucked in the slits and create a tornado, which will cause a forced aspiration of the fire, giving you a nice flame tornado. You can mix in various fun chemicals to get colored flame and smoke. As long as the tornado keeps going, the box will not burn. It might burn as the fuel starts to go out, but a garden hose will solve that.

Or, you can do what the amazing guys at SRL (http://srl.org/machines/flamehurricane/) did and use five pulse jet engines to create the tornado, then have nozzles spraying 1.5 gallons of high pressure gasoline per second in the middle of the tornado. There's nothing like exaggerated engineering!

[Lawgiver]

Yep, it happens. Our house burned completely when I was a teen and I remember seeing a fire tornado, I don't know what they're called or the forces that causes them, But it does happen.

[dungeondragon18]

I've seen this photo before in various places on the internet, but none of those places are really reliable (blogs and humor sites, mostly). But the phenomenon that the picture is claimed to document-- fire whirls-- is quite real.

[DemonWolf]

This is obviously a picture of a house being attacked by a dragon. I vote real.

[snopes]

There's some debate over whether this is genuinely the only known extant photograph of Johnny Storm.

[Brad from Georgia]

My disreptutable redneck uncle used to burn tires for fun. No, really. The man loved a "tahr fahr," as he called the treadful conflagration. A tire fire gets very hot, and I recall many a fire vortex forming over Uncle's blazes. One looked something like the one in the photo--a tall, narrow column that whipped around alarmingly in the wind.

After a big truck tire had completely burned, by the way, there were loops of steel wire remaining. Once my uncle told me "Boy, go out in the backyard there an' clean up that tahr fahr wahr."

Good times. Good times.