Will your mattress hold up in a fire?

Mattresses are big fire starters in house fires across our area and the nation. Over a five-year period, nearly 400 people died from fires that started with a mattress. Another 1,300 people were injured

In Beaver Falls last week, we learned a cellphone sparked a mattress fire at a home, forcing the homeowner to quickly escape with burns on her hand. Firefighters threw her mattress out the window to keep the fire from spreading.

If your mattress is older than a decade, it's not up to current federal fire regulations for mattresses. Even if you bought a mattress from some discount stores and it seems new, it might be made of material decades old, that could go up in flames with one spark.

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Fire experts estimate you only have two minutes to escape a house fire. Anything that burns quickly, decreases your chances of survival.

That's why we worked with Allegheny County Emergency Services to put these mattresses to the test.

One is an old mattress from someone's spare bedroom, the second we bought new and a third is a refurbished mattress bought at a local thrift store.

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We started with the new mattress. At 30 seconds in, the fire was isolated to a few different small pockets with the stitching burning.

The old mattress was a much different story. It burned quickly and went even quicker when we shut the room off.

In less than eight minutes, the entire mattress was burning. Mattresses made before 2007 do not meet current fire safety standards, so this mattress may not have been as protected as the new one.

Now to the refurbished mattress. The International Sleep Products Association has issued strong warnings about refurbished mattresses because they can be made from recycled mattresses that are decades old.

"The problem with renovated mattresses is, often they are not brought up to current fire standards," said Ryan Trainer, of the ISPA. "The renovated mattress could be much much older, we see mattresses 20 to 30 years old that are discarded and picked up by renovators."

Trainer says some of those renovators do nothing more than putting a new cover on old materials.

Here's what to look for on your mattress. By law, all mattresses have to have a label in clear sight. It has a description of what is in your mattress, and whether it is made up of recycled parts.

Will your mattress hold up in a fire?

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