Texas BBQ

By anders pearson 22 Mar 2004

i’m still down in austin. my flight is later this afternoon. had a fun, exciting morning today.

lani, being the crazy grad student with way too much work and not enough time for niceties like sleep had set her alarm clock for 6AM so she could finish grading some papers before class. it went off, she hit snooze, asked me “do you smell smoke?”, i said no, and we settled back in. a few minutes later, the alarm goes off again, she hits snooze and sits up saying “i really think i smell smoke”. we hear a sort of popping noise like little firecrackers going off and gets up. she walks over to the stairs and says, pretty calmly, “anders, there’s a fire downstairs”. i’m up out of bed in a second and following her down in just my underwear. i ask her where her fire extinguishers are, she says that she doesn’t think they have any.

lani lives with two roommates who both live on the first floor of the house. Mary’s room is right off the living room, with glass double-doors and a curtain seperating her from the living room and a door to the kitchen. Leslie’s room is on the other side of the kitchen. through the glass doors to Mary’s room, we can see the glow of flames right on the other side. and there’s a pretty serious amount of smoke coming out the cracks. lani runs back upstairs to find the phone, i wake up leslie and run into the kitchen. i open the door to mary’s room from there. i can see flames about 6 inches to a foot high spread out on the floor right by the glass doors; the smoke is already pretty thick. mary doesn’t appear to be in the room (i found out later that she wasn’t home). i run back into the kitchen looking for something to put the fire out with. the best i can do is to fill a frying pan with water from the sink. i make about two quick dashes from the sink into the smoke pouring what water i can on the fire which seems to be centered around a pile of magazines on the floor.

leslie appears with a tiny fire extinguisher and empties it on the fire which gets about 80% of what was remaining. i toss another frying pan of water on it and manage to get out the rest of the actual flames with the water and patting them out with the pan. i make another trip to dump some water on the ashes, but the smoke is getting really thick and lani is yelling at me to get out because smoke inhalation is what kills people. so i get out and we wait on the back porch for the fire department who show up in probably two minutes. lani had grabbed a sweatshirt and pants while she was on the phone, leslie had been sleeping in shorts and a t-shirt, but i was standing around in just my underwear when the firefighters arrived.

they quickly declared the fire out and set up some big fans to blow the smoke out of the house. leslie had managed to cut her foot on some of the glass from the door that had shattered so she was surrounded by firemen who were making sure she was alright (later, she admitted that that part of the morning hadn’t been so bad).

once things cleared out, they told us that we had done a good job and that it was a good thing we caught it in time. they think it started because there had been a bunch of papers and magazines blocking a heater grate in the floor right by the glass doors. they had caught fire and the curtain caught from there, burning up and around the door before falling down and setting more of the papers on fire. there was a big cloth and metal wardrobe full of clothes right next the the door that had been singed a bit. if the fire had gone for another minute it probably would have caught fire. if it had caught fire, it would have really gone up and frying pans of water wouldn’t have cut it.

in the end there was pretty minor property damage, the house is going to smell like smoke for a few weeks, leslie has a small cut on her foot, and i’ll probably be coughing up black stuff for a few days, but none of the people, gerbils, or the 3-legged cat living in the house were really hurt. so as far as house fires go, i’d say this one was pretty successful.

i’ll post pictures of the aftermath when i get home.

Tags: fire