hawk wild bbq co
Senior Cook
I have been working on smoking for a small chain of resturants in my area as alot of you know. Last night I have a large amount of meat in my custom offset reverse flow. Had everything cooking but had a hard time controlling my temps throughout the chamber firebox temp was running normal to low but left side opposite stacks and firebox was running very hot for some reason. I had just figured it was 90 plus degrees and windy out and it was just playing hell on my air flow. Had 20 large brisket flats and 10 pork butts cooking at the time. About 6 hrs into the cook I look out at my smoker and I am chucking smoke from everywhere on the unit. Thick dark smoke. I went out and had a huge grease fire due to the amout of fat running off of the meat and my failure to open my drain valve. With all the fat not going out it made its way over the lip of the reverse flow and got under it and headed to the firebox. I in the heat of the moment closed all the vents trying to snuff the fire out. Didnt work. So fire extinguish time was at hand. So what did I do? Stupidly I opened the left side chamber door! Can we say BACKDRAFT? Fireball hurled out at me at face level burning my left arm and burning hair. I was more than lucky. I had someone on my shoulder yesterday. To all that love what we do, we ALWAYS have to do this with caution. My senses are now going to be alot sharper to what my unit is doing and the dangers that exist when working with this will ALWAYS be on my mind. Today I am working on cleaning out my unit, dealing with the loss of over 600 dollars worth of product and thanking God that I am home safe with my family and not in a burn unit dealing with major skin grafting and all the pain that it could have caused. I will continue to do what we love to do, but will stick with the smaller work from now on. I hope this post will put this in the back of everyones mind so that this type of possible tragedy will not happen to any of my fellow smokers.