Flour Explosions

I've had a lot to do with flour in my life. Here are two recent incidents with flour in my life:
1) Last night for FHE we had a flour war. It was awesome. At first we played by the rules with these little bags of flour in nylons. When you hit someone with them they would make a mark on you and then you were dead. It was pretty cool because we could just use the nylon flour balls over and over. But our FHE dad bought a 20 lb bag of flour to fill up 13 little nylon bags. Needless to say he had a ton of flour left over. In the end that flour bag was empty and everyone was covered in flour. We were so sneeky and we got our FHE dad wet too so the flour truned into paste. It was pretty cool. The only bad part was that I got a hand full of flour right into my eyeball. Yes, my eye was open and now it's all red. Kinda gross, but worth the fun.

2) Last week my class went on a field trip to Deseret Mills flour milling company. It was really cool to go there and see how flour is made. My mom used to grind her own wheat occasionally when I was little. Then she would make bread out of it. When she did it a distinct smell would permeate the whole house. I loved it. When we walked into the "roller room" where the flour is actually ground that smell was everywhere. I was in heaven. Anyway, the whole mill has hardwood flooring and is kept pretty clean. I thought that was just to ensure clean flour. Aparently this is not the case. I found out that flour mills are pretty dangerous because they are suseptable to getting burned down. The question in my mind was, how could this be? I'm sure you are all wondering the same thing. Well here's your answer. Flour is made from the endosperm of the wheat kernel which is very high in carbohydrates. Carbohydrates (ie. sugars) are very flamable substances. If or really when the flour gets in the air it has a big supply of oxygen. One little spark say from a maching and......KABOOM, the whole place explodes! Amazing. So how do you ask, do they prevent this from happening? They keep the place very, very clean.

So anyway, just incase you wanted to know. Flour is AWESOME.