that a fire produces. When I was a teen, our house caught fire in the middle of the night. It started in the living room, near the couch. My brother was still awake because he had come home very late from a night out with old friends. (He was home on leave from the Navy.)
I woke up quickly when my brother stood in my second floor bedroom doorway telling me to get up and get out. Before he got to the word fire, I knew. My room was filled with smoke. It was the farthest down the hall from the head of the stairs, but smoke had reached it already.
We all got out ok, but I will never forget the roaring sound of the fire and the intense heat. The layout of the house was such that the staircase from the second floor ended at the bottom right before a foyer at the front door. But to get down the stairs, we had to pass an area directly across from the living room, which had a large, double door opening off of a hallway that led from the foyer.
Heat rises. So, at the midway point on the staircase, when the entire far wall of the living room was in flames, the heat was so intense, and my eyes were burning so much from the smoke, that I felt like running back up the stairs to get away from it. I didn't even try, though, for two reasons. First, all those years of school fire drills had hammered into me that you NEVER turn back and you ALWAYS get outside immediately.
The second reason was that my father was at the rear of the line as we went down the stairs, making sure that we all kept going forward.
The house was saved and the fire contained to the living room because, while waiting for the fire department response, my father ran around to the back where the garden hose was still attached to an outdoor faucet. He shot a steady stream of water on the fire, through the living room window from outside. (The heat had shattered or melted the glass.)
The reach of the smoke and soot was astonishing to me. Our dishes, inside closed cupboard doors, were covered in a film of smoke and soot. Clothes inside my bedroom closet smelled of smoke. (I'd left the closet door open when I went to bed.) The walls and ceilings of the first floor rooms were all covered in a smokey, sooty film.
But, the fire itself had only burned one entire wall of the living room, the couch, the drapes behind the couch, and the carpet under the couch, plus the wall pictures. The hardwoodd floor beneath the carpet was badly scorched.
If a one room, contained fire can produce that much heat and smoke, imagine what a burning forest and city buildings all burning at once can do.
The smoke would have suffocated people before the flames reached them.
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