With fire in the headlines, I suggest you do this NOW! Personal Story [View all]

[zooks]

Last edited Thu Nov 15, 2018, 06:06 PM - Edit history (1)

This is absolutely the best advice I have and hope it gets passed along to as many people as possible.

My story is that I was making toast with melted cheese in a toaster oven. I left the kitchen in my apartment to get a towel from a linen closet just around the corner from the kitchen - I was away less than 2 minutes. When I came back to the kitchen I froze in my tracks because there was a roaring fire in the oven and flames were shooting up 18". What paralyzed me was seeing the flames just inches away from dried flowers on a shelf above the toaster oven. Disaster was effing imminent.

It was a matter of pure luck that a neighbour who recently moved left me among other things a large box of Baking Soda (something I normally don't have) so I grabbed it and opened the oven door and emptied the entire box.

The fire was successfully extinguished so my advice is to fill a container like a large yogurt container (something with a lid you easily rip off) with either 1 large box of Baking Soda or 2 regular size boxes, label it and leave it away from any stove and within easy reach like in a corner by the doorway. I would suggest doing that even if you have a fire extinguisher and I'll tell you why.

If I had had an extinguisher I think given my state of shock and paralysis that I would have fumbled and lost precious seconds trying to figured out how to use it. Those seconds matter. With the box of Baking Soda all I had to do was dump the contents it into the oven and that I could manage.

I think one has to take into account that one might freeze in panic when faced with an unexpected fire so one needs options - have an extinguisher but have the Baking Soda option as well.

What was shocking is that the fire happened so fast that the smoke detector didn't go off because there wasn't enough time for smoke to accumulate. Had I been gone one minute more the dried flowers probably would have caught fire and become a torch. If that had happened the whole kitchen would have been shortly engulfed in flames.

Scary stuff.



So fill a container now and set it aside. Having unopened boxes in the back of a shelf is not an option because seconds absolutely count.