Yesterday seemed like a quiet Sunday. My wife Lisa and I were getting ready to depart for a pot-luck with friends; she was in the kitchen putting the finishing touches on some dishes and I was in the back room changing into my going-out clothes.
Suddenly the dogs began to make a commotion. This wasn’t the “Oh boy, oh boy, someone’s at the door! Open the door so we can get loved!” commotion the dogs usually make, either; this was the dog version of “Humans! Something Is Seriously Wrong!”
Dropping what we were doing, Lisa and I converged on the living room immediately. Not nearby, but directly outside our door, there were several loud bangs and the sound of something breaking, and a woman’s voice screamed “SOMEBODY PLEASE HELP ME!”
That got my heart rate going.
Our dogs were frantic to get to the door; they can really pull when they’re excited. Despite that, I trusted Lisa to “Hold the dogs!” and threw the door open.
It’s fortunate it wasn’t an armed attacker; I suppose I wasn’t really prepared for one, running out empty-handed, and considering I’m a middle-aged man still recovering from cracked ribs (mostly better now, thank you). Instead, the neighbor from the condo unit across the hall, a college-age girl, had been trying to smash open the Plexiglas barrier protecting the building’s shared fire extinguisher, on the wall between our two units. She’d cut her hand and was bleeding. She was in something of a state, looked at me wildly, and said “I don’t know how to use it. There’s a FIRE in my kitchen!”
I’m not a fireman, nor do I play one on TV, but I was pretty sure I could work an extinguisher. I picked it up and pulled the grenade-style pin. I could see what she meant; there were additional gimmicks on the extinguisher, a tag and a plastic tie both looped through part of the handle assembly, that might need to be dealt with to make the extinguisher work, but I ignored them and threw open her door. Her kitchen was immediately visible, and her toaster oven was on fire.
Okay, it was just a toaster oven. However, this was about as serious a fire as I can imagine being in a toaster oven – it couldn’t get any bigger without becoming a “something else” fire. Flames the length of my hands were streaming out the whole front of the toaster oven; it looked like a gas fireplace log. I don’t know what was in the oven to cause that, but I didn’t give it any further thought. Still not certain I’d done everything required to prepare the extinguisher for spraying, I brought it up, sighted, and pulled the handle from about six to eight feet away.
WHOOSH! The fire instantly disappeared in a cloud of smoke and extinguisher output. I gave it two more doses for good measure…FOOMP, FOOMP. The extinguisher did a great job. Frankly I was mildly surprised that it worked as advertised. Considering the smallish size of the toaster oven, the room was filled with just an amazing amount of smoke, dust, and chemicals, with more rolling up out of the toaster by the second.
I stepped back out of that into momentarily clean air. Mindful that the mixture expanding from the kitchen was certainly nasty and possibly toxic, I told the young woman and Lisa (who had secured the dogs and come out to help), “Stay back! I’m going to open the window,” took a deep breath, held it, and went in and did just that.
As I strode back out of the kitchen, through the swirling cloud of smoke and dust, still carrying the extinguisher in one hand, I glanced at her injury, and suggested “You’d better look after your hand.” She nodded, staring at me a little.
It was only then that I realized I’d come running out in the middle of changing my shirt. I had no shirt on. I was covered in extinguisher dust, bare-chested, striding through a cloud of smoke and telling the women to stay back where it was safe.
You know, like some corny television action hero, or a cheesecake calendar photo of a firefighter. Mr. February, perhaps.
I suddenly felt very self-conscious and out-of-place. Nobody looked at me like I was out-of-place, though.
The unit’s smoke alarm began to scream and she shut it off. We made sure she got her toaster unplugged and also turned off her regular oven, which was baking something, so that she could concentrate on her wound and on cleanup without something else catching fire. She had a desk fan, but Lisa took over a box fan to help air out her place; the young lady bandaged her own hand (she’s had first aid training), and she called her mom to come help while we called the fire department to make sure we didn’t need to report anything (we didn’t). After that, it was just clean-up; I wiped down the extinguisher and picked up the shards of Plexiglas panel. My wife is on the condo association board and is planning to bring up the issue of the little metal bar’s inadequacy in breaking open the fire extinguisher cabinet; I’m going to put a hammer out there until some official solution is found.
Then I still had to get ready for the pot-luck. Covered in dusk and smoky grime, I jumped in the shower all over again, while Lisa gave the dogs some well-deserved treats and praise. At least I had a conversation-starter for the dinner now. We did eventually make it to our party – but not until I carefully checked all the burners, oven, and toaster in our own kitchen before leaving the condo.
