Heroic Acts

[glatt]

I put out a kitchen fire in my house when I was in my early teens. My mom left a pan of oil heating for a few minutes and was momentarily upstairs when it ignited. I heard the burst of flames and crackling of a fire from the living room. I emptied a fire extinguisher on it and then switched to the sink faucet spray wand to finish off the grease-laden curtains that were still burning. I had the fire out in less than a minute.

After the fire department left, we went to McDonalds for dinner.

We had to re-paint the kitchen and all the ceilings in the house because of the smoke stains, and sand down some charring on a few cabinets and refinish them.

The fire would have been much worse if I hadn't heard the initial ignition. The smoke detector didn't go off until about 2-3 minutes after I had already put the fire out, and there was a lot of thick black oily smoke being generated by this fire.