Titanium Alloy Clubs Can Cause Golfers to Scream 'Fire!' Instead of 'Fore!'

MISSION VIEJO, CA — It’s a part of golf. Your ball gets stuck in the rough, and you have to hit it back onto the fairway. But for a group of golfers Tuesday on the Arroyo Trabuco course, it went horribly wrong.

According to Orange County Fire Authority’s Capt. Larry Kurtz, this isn’t the first time golfers have yelled “Fire!” instead of “Fore!”

Arroyo Trabuco Golf Course has seen more than just yesterday’s wildfire on its grounds. At the same course, another brush fire started in a similar situation in 2013.

“I just punched a 3-iron to get to the ball back in play,” golfer Steve Parsons told the Orange County Register after the 2013 incident. The next thing he knew, he was standing in “a ring of fire.”

On that day, the wind changed direction, and the fire burned itself out. The golfers escaped with no more than singed legs and a lesson about golfing with titanium clubs.

Yesterday in Mission Viejo, at the same Arroyo Canyon golf course, the hillside wasn’t as lucky.

In 2014, fire struck an Orange County course again when a player chipped a rock instead of a ball at Shady Canyon Golf Course in Irvine, a course which also burned in 2010.

In 2014, when 25 acres burned and the fire was close to involving houses, OCFA Capt. Steve Concialdi reported on conclusions from fire investigators.

"Each golfer had used titanium-plated three irons at the course before the fire," Concialdi said in a USA Today report. "The ground was rocky on the courses, and while everyone was wary of that conclusion it was the only solution we had."

The University of California Irvine Scientists went to work on the OCFA Fire Investigators theory and discovered a real danger in the southwest when golfers use titanium club heads in dry rough conditions.

“(Titanium) alloys are 40 percent lighter, which can make the club easier to swing, including when chipping errant balls out of tough spots,” UC Irvine scientists Janahan Arulmoli, Bryant Vu, Ming-Je Sung, Farghalli A. Mohamed and James C. Earthman stated in their findings. “In Southern California, those spots are often in flammable scrub brush.”

A recreation of the course conditions in the lab caught the sparking of the titanium alloy against stone, seen here in a YouTube video.

"After striking the rocks with the titanium club, we saw sparks that were 3,000 degrees and lasted one second," Earthman, a chemical engineering and materials science professor at UC Irvine and the lead researcher of the study, told USA Today. "If that spark reached dry foliage, it would ignite almost instantly."

In the report, it was noted that stainless steel golf club heads, when tested under the same conditions, produced no sparks.

“When a club coated with the lightweight metal is swung and strikes a rock, it creates sparks that can heat to more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit for long enough to ignite dry foliage,” the study stated. Those findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal Fire and Materials.

Photo from YouTube Video: Slow motion of James Earthman, chemical engineering & materials science professor, demonstrating his research finding that sparks fly when titanium golf club heads hit rocks in the rough, potentially igniting brush.