Tell me about the worst fire you've ever experienced personally.

In My Humble Opinion
21

When I was in the Royal Navy at HMS Collingwood we had one of the accommodation blocks go up in flames.

I had only recently moved from hat block into another, and most of my training class was housed in there. This happened during the day and so we were all out doing our work.
The base fire party only had very limited equipment and found they could not prevent the fire spreading due to windows being shut - the hoses could not break the glass on the upper floors. By the time the fire brigade arrived most of the damage was done, they had specific hose nozzles for smashing windows and they brought it under control.

The middle two flows were destroyed, the ground floor was wet but generally ok, and the top floor was mostly destroyed, except for rooms towards the four end corners which had been drenched. Unfortunately the kit that was in the lockers in those rooms was still so badly affected by the heat that it was all useless - the clothes looked ok but just crumbled to the touch.

Possibly the worst was when HMS ardent was sunk during the Falklands war. She was hit by a number of bombs in Falklands sound but the thing that killed her were the fires, especially the hanger fire - the information is all online. Our ship was not hit but the survivors were spread around the fleet so we got the word on what took place pretty quickly.

HMS Ardent was on a mission that we had been originally detailed to undertake, however due to some issues we were not able to fulfil the role and she took our orders instead.

22

A house in my small village got completely burned to the ground when I was a kid. It was the same cause mentioned the OP - they didn’t clean out the dryer’s lint trap enough. Luckily no one was hurt, but ever since that day, I’m religious about lint traps.

23

The worst that I’ve seen was in Canada in 1989.

Me and my friends went out one evening to go to a party and at one point the driver let out an expletive. On the right side of the road, there was this house totally engulfed in flames. The thing that struck me the most was that although it was really dark, you could easily see the furniture and walls deep inside the house as the flames were so intense.

When we drove past the place again a few hours later, you’d have thought at first that there had never been a house there. Only when we got close did we see a huge pile of smoking rubble. The rest had completely burned down.

The only one I actually experienced was in 2002. I was having an argument with my girlfriend when I suddenly felt that something was off, walked to the door and looked through the peephole. I couldn’t see anything so I opened the door. There was smoke everywhere. I told my girlfriend to grab her things and run. We were on the third floor and the smoke was even worse below but we made a safe exit, although she fell at one point as the floor was kind of greasy.

24

I’m glad to report that this is the worst fire-related incident I’ve experienced because I’ve afraid of fire most of my life (the mom of a kindergarten friend told us in graphic detail how her middle daughter died by hiding during a fire the year before)

It was mid-winter, and we worked in a really big former mill building several stories high that housed a dozens of small businesses, and the building’s owner didn’t do as much as he should about ice. Just the year before a coffin-sized slab of ice fell off the roof and crashed through the ladies’ room window, nearly missing someone, so you’d think he would have learned…

Anyway. It was just after lunch, and those of us who got back first were waiting for the rest of our group to return to the room so we could be trained on a new item. A couple of us smelled something odd. “Do you smell…gas?” one person finally asked me. Thinking about that, I agreed, it did smell a little like gas. We two decided to go find a supervisor -

But before we could even walk into to what passed for a hallway (made out of cubical walls) there was a faint whoosh sound that made us look up. High above head was a very large, grated pipe and there was now a very large ball of fire exiting said pipe.

This was followed by a lot of yelling, and I learned how to pull a fire alarm, which was harder than I imagined it would be. We all - everyone in the entire ginormous building - made it outside safely and waited for the fire department.

In the end there was very little damage beyond the gas pipe ice fell off the roof and damaged. But I don’t want to see a huge unplanned fireball in person ever again.

25

I have two stories.

Here’s #1

I was 16 or 17 & had gone with friends to a local outdoor burger hangout. A dozen picnic tables & an ordering window with a small parking lot out back. This was Southern California in the 70s.

Directly across the 5-lane boulevard was an old fashioned lumber yard / hardware / paint store. This was before the advent of big box stores so the lumber was in wooden racks outdoors about 3 stories tall. The building was WWII vintage wood construction w board siding & well-worn hardwood flooring.

I’d been in there umpteen times as a customer either alone or with my parents ever since I could remember. The place was a rabbit warren of hard goods & paint & thinner & stuff piled up the ceiling. Most of the shelving & fixtures were wood also. In those days all paint was oil-based and the place had this cool old varnish & shellac smell throughout.

It caught fire while we were eating our burgers. We stayed to watch for a couple hours. At one point we had to back off about a half-block because the heat was too much. When we left it was still going furiously. Before it was over it was a multi-city mutual aid fire. The papers said they finally got it stopped about dawn.

The next day there was little more than some charred sticks poking up out of a pile of rubble. A couple of neighboring buildings burned as well before they got it under control.

It was a heck of a show. Alarming in the sense of “I’m damn glad I’m not inside it and that I’m not the owner”, but otherwise it was just fun to watch.

26

#2:

Wife & I were visiting Reno NV & staying in a hotel on the outskirts of downtown on about the 10th floor. This was probably around 1990. Mid-afternoon we’d returned to the room for a short nap after a long hike around town. Woke up to the sound of lots of sirens.

Across the street was a block of one story 1960s era light industry / warehouse buildings. One such building right across the street was well on fire. It was an office / workshop / factory building about 75 feet on a side with an office / storefront along the front and a small loading dock & roll-up doors on the alley side we could see.

We sat there watching out the window for about an hour as two companies of fire trucks fought the fire. Pretty quickly it was obvious they had written off the building & were just preventing the adjacent buildings from getting involved. Large chunks of roof section would collapse into the center from time to time, sending up a mountain of sparks.

The wind was at our backs so we had an unobstructed view of the whole affair. Pretty neat. Eventually it was just a wet smoldering pile with about 10% of the walls still standing. From what we could see of the wrecked interior it looked as if the building was vacant. We didn’t see merchandize, raw materials, or machinery; just obvious building debris.

27

This, irony of ironies, happened in my region several days ago.

28

Black Saturday, specifically the Central Gippsland fire that killed 11 locals, almost completely razed the Calignee township (destroying 57 of 61 houses), and threatened the power stations and open cut coal mine. It was one of several major fires that raged across the state that day, claiming 173 lives and ranked as the eighth deadliest recorded fire internationally ever.

29

The biggest fire I witnessed was a couple of years ago. A condominium complex all framed up with wood was set on fire. It spread fast and the flames were massive. The complex was almost the size of a city block.

30

Not directly near me but in the same subdivision.
My entire subdivision was flooded from Katrina. All the houses had to be gutted and rebuilt. As is inevitable in such situations, there were fires in a few houses after the rebuild. People try to reuse house wiring, electricians take shortcuts, homeowners try to do some repairs themselves, etc. The building inspectors were so overwhelmed that if people stopped by for a building permit at all, that was considered following the rules.
Anyway, one house burned from an electrical fault a couple of days before the owner was to move back in. So literally the contractor finished the job and had to start over. Naturally with less money since now the insurance company was paying the full cost. In another fire the family bought a rebuild and moved into a house with a pool in the yard. One night they woke up (fortunately!) and noticed that the ceiling of their bedroom was bright red with reflected light. A pump in the pool-house had overheated and set the pool-house attached to the main house on fire. That place was a total loss. They tore it down and sold the slab. Someone eventually came along and built a very nice house on the property.

My house had a couple of close calls, but the only thing we actually lost to fire was a trash can. The contractors had emptied their trash at the end of the day and fortunately it was far enough from the house to quietly end up as a puddle of molten plastic on the driveway.

31

There was a fire in my Navy-provided housing unit. I was overseas and got the call from my wife telling me they were okay. Luckily it happened during the day and the kids were outside the house. An extension cord under a carpet frayed and set the carpet to smoldering. When it started burning, a neighbor noticed smoke coming from the second floor window and ran over with a garden hose after calling the fire department. It was snuffed out, but caused burn damage and a lot of smoke damage, but no injuries.

32

Perhaps not what the OP is looking for, but my worst fire story had to do with a riding lawnmower that would not run. This was a single-cylinder motor and I could sit in the seat and crank and crank, and it wouldn’t start. Now, I couldn’t decide if it was that it wasn’t getting any gas or no spark, so I tried to test the spark. Well, there are interlocks that prevent you from engaging the starter motor if you aren’t sitting on the driver’s seat, so I defeated those interlocks, but I still had to stretch around the front, with the spark plug removed and grounded to the engine block so I could check for a spark.

Well, I figured out how to make it all work, and when I cranked the engine, gas poured out the spark plug hole, coating me with gasoline. At the same time, the spark plug did it’s job, ignition the gas. I became a human torch!

Now, they tell you, that if you should find yourself on fire, do not run around in circles, but to stop, drop, and roll. So, naturally, I began to run around in circles. I kept hearing “STOP, DROP, AND ROLL” in my head, but my whole chest was flaming and it seemed to me, at the time, the only logical thing to do was to run around in circles.

Well, I forced my training to override my instincts, and I dropped to the ground and rolled around. I extinguished the flames which resulted in 1st degree burns on my chest (a sunburn is a 1st degree burn). I was lucky.

If you do find yourself on fire, remember. Stop. Drop. And Roll.

33

Excavating, your story qualifies and then some. Glad you’re OK!

34

I witnessed a brush fire in my apartment complex when I was a kid. Kinda frightening, but it was far away from any apartments, and was snuffed out pretty quickly. My dad helped put it out.

Another story: Someone dropped a lit cigarette into one of the planters outside the Blockbuster store I was working at, and smoke started heavily emerging from it. I saw it and dumped a huge bucket of water over it, snuffing it out.

35

My rich neighbors across the street were playing with fireworks and one went astray and burnt down their detached garage and torched part of the barn.

36

My high school burned down at the beginning of the second semester of my senior year. My mother woke me up late one January night and told me to look outside right away because the the entire sky was orange and flickering with the reflections from an extremely large fire or explosion. This was in a very small town in 1991 and we didn’t have any good way to find out what it was so we just threw on some clothes and jumped in the car to find the cause. This was incidentally just before Gulf War I was set to break out and my first thought was that the Iraqis had someone managed to blow up our tiny downtown area in a preemptive strike for some unknown reason.

As we got closer to the fire a few miles away, it started to become apparent where it was coming from. We were always told that the beautiful main building, originally built in 1921 with hardwood floors religiously oiled by the janitors every day, was a firetrap but even knowing that in theory didn’t prepare anyone for how quickly and violently it was engulfed in flames. We got there not twenty minutes after it started and flames were already shooting up hundreds of feet into the air and it was so hot that not even the fire department could approach it. My mother and I weren’t the only ones that were woken up by it. There were a few hundred other people gathered there as well and many of them were quite upset. We sat back a few blocks away and just watched it burn with occasional explosions as it consumed everything in it.

The cause was almost certainly arson although the culprits were never caught. Someone called it in almost as soon as it started when they saw the long drapes in the auditorium catch fire but it was too late to save it even a few short minutes later when the fire department arrived. The whole thing went up like a firecracker factory.

The good news was that the school really did need to be replaced for structural and just about every other reason but voters kept denying the bonds to build a new one. Burning the old one to the ground is a good way to jump-start that process and the new school is objectively better in every way.

37

When I was a kid a house a few doors over burnt down (kid playing with matches), it sat empty for a few years and became the local ‘haunted house’. It was eventually rebuilt, sold and then it burnt down again a few years after that - insurance fire. So far the third house on that block has survived.

Two years ago my wife & I were woken up by a loud ‘explosion’. We went out the front to find our neighbours car well alight (the explosion we had heard was apparently the glass of the windscreen blowing out from the heat). The owner was using his garden hose to wet the trees next to the car to keep the fire from spreading. FD arrived and put it out just after that. He claimed it was teenagers out lighting random fires but we suspected it was more related to his former life as a member of a bike gang.

I was around for the 2003 Canberra bushfiresas well.

38

The only significant fire I’ve seen was a brushfire in Southern California. Just this long line of fire snaking across the hillsides off to one side of us as we drove past.

39

I was at home in Vegas eating lunch when this happened PEPCON disaster - Wikipedia. It damn near caved in my sliding glass door 10 miles distant and facing away from the blast.

I climbed up on my roof and had a view about like that picture in the article, although from the opposite side. It took awhile to be able to see flames through the smoke. Didn’t know what it was, but knew it was big.

40

My sister owns several properties next to each other and every other year they do a controlled burn of the weeds and grasses. One year the control wasn’t good enough. Thus the name of their place is “Black Valley etc etc”. The only real damage was to a stable (needed one side replaced) but the horse was ok.

The saddest fire happened to a guy who worked as a clown occasionally at the restaurant I worked at. Their baby monitor malfunctioned and started a fire in the nursery. The guy clawed his way through the walls to get to his kids. One baby died and the dad and other baby were horribly burned. First Alert ordered to pay $17 million in faulty smoke detector suit | AP News