WHY do people store ashes inside?
We've had calls with ashes inside the basement in a cardboard box. What the ####?
I've had a dear friend whose house burned down from someone disposing of ashes into their garage -- she was at work, thank god her husband, two kids, sister, and sister's kids all got out.
My ashes go in a metal bucket. If I don't have time to fire up the garden tractor and trailer and haul them down to the garden, they sit in the gravel driveway away from anything for a while. If they've sat for a week, I've been known to pour them into a 5 gallon bucket (learned the first time my metal bucket is six gallons...) then after I fill up the metal bucket haul both down to the garden.
Years ago we had a dump fire in the area. State park crew had dumped ashes, some where still hot...before it was done we had three pumpers at draft -- somewhere around 4,000 gallons per minute -- and the local National Guard armory was an engineering company that came down with their payloaders to assist that town's DPW.
After that they leave the trash cans full of ashes out for months. Guys hate emptying them because they've been rained on many, many times before dumping now.
BTW -- even if stored inside in a fire proof area, whatever is still burning in that bucket is pumping out Carbon Monoxide.