Emergency!

One of my favorite TV shows growing up was Emergency! — a show that any little boy would love with fire trucks, lights and sirens, firefighters, lights and sirens, ambulances, lights and sirens, exciting action, lights and sirens…

Last night, it hit a little too close to home, though. We had our own EMERGENCY!

Fortunately, everything turned out okay in the end, except for a few minor, but painful injuries. But it gave everyone a big scare.

I was relaxing in my recliner. Ashley was doing something else (I’m not sure what). Sarah was working on a class assignment that involved making churros, “a fried-dough pastry-based snack,” for her class. Karla was helping her.

Karla and Sarah were deep-frying the pastries. All of a sudden one of the pieces of dough exploded and then another. Boiling oil splattered everywhere — on the ceiling, on the surrounding walls, on the kitchen floor. A flash of flame lit up the stove area. Both Karla and Sarah cried out — partly because they were startled, partly because they had been sprayed with hot oil and partly because the situation was plain terrifying. They instinctively backed away, but Karla fell backwards because of the frying oil that had coated the floor.

As I saw Karla fall and heard both cry out, I leapt out of my recliner. Keep in mind that I am a large man and when I’ve been resting, I don’t move very quickly out, especially when I’m really tired. But the sight of my panicked loved ones made me move like I was a top-fit athlete. I was moving so quickly that I actually slipped on the living room floor and fell, but I leapt to me feet almost instantly.

I got Karla and Sarah to move out of the kitchen, screamed at the dogs to stay back and tried to quickly survey the situation and decide what to do. The flames reignited each time one of the remaining pastries exploded. I grabbed the kitchen fire extinguisher and sprayed the frying pot and the stove area. After about a minute of waiting to make sure it wouldn’t explode anymore, I was able to reach the burner control and turn off the burner.

The next few minutes was spent assessing injuries and calming frayed nerves. Sarah, who typically doesn’t react well to crises, was pretty shaken up. After we calmed her down, I then had to keep Karla from instinctively trying to clean everything up. I knew that she didn’t need to be doing anything except tending to her burns and that trying to wash things would be a unnecessarily painful for her. Her right arm was bright red and starting to blister. Sarah also had burns on her arm and Karla helped her tend to her burns. Karla, after some prodding, tended to her own burns as Ashley and I began the cleanup process.

Let me tell you that cooking oil sprayed everywhere is not easy to clean. Let me also tell you that a fire extinguisher can leave its own pretty big mess. There was fire extinguisher “dust” coating everything within a 3-foot radius of where I sprayed it. And mix that fire extinguisher “dust” with cooking oil and you have a sticky, soup glop that’s a challenge to clean up as well.

The first task was to mop the floor so that we could stand in the kitchen without it seeming like we were moving around on a wet ice rink. Bleach seemed to do the trick. After that, we had to clean surfaces covered with oil and the fire extinguisher “dust.” These surfaces included the stove top, the stove front, stove sides, counter top, the vent hood above the stove, the cabinets near the stove and even the ceiling (we have a low ceiling). Every appliance and utensil within the “fallout” area had to be washed. Some of Karla’s cooking magazines and papers (with recipes and kitchen stuff) were so ruined that she just threw them away.

It took about two hours to get everything cleaned up. We got to bed let. But we were still grateful that it wasn’t worse.

I have nightmares about a fire in our house. It sometimes keeps me up a night. This was a scare that shook everyone. I am thankful that everyone is okay (apart from painful burns). I am thankful that we had that fire extinguisher in the kitchen — I will be buying a few later today to replace the one that was used and to add to our collection. Last night made me a big believer in being prepared.

Here’s a sobering reminder of the dangers of a kitchen oil fire.

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The big problem I had last night was that our burner controls are behind the burners, not on the front of the stove like the one shown in the video. I couldn’t turn the burner off until the immediate danger of exploding oil was sufficiently diminished to avoid more serious injury. Fortunately, I had the fire extinguisher to help reduce the threat of fire enough to turn the burner off.

When it comes time to replace the stove, I’ll look for one that has burner controls on the front to make it easier to turn off the burners in an EMERGENCY!