Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires in Your House

Woke up this morn­ing to the sound of my upstairs neigh­bor hol­ler­ing and bang­ing on the door. When I wan­dered out to see what was going on, it turns out he was­n’t bang­ing on my door, but the back door of the next-door neigh­bor. Smoke was pour­ing out of the sec­ond-floor win­dow and he was shout­ing to wake the neighbors.

I dialed 911

just to be safe, but a lad­der engine pulled up out front before an oper­a­tor came on the line. I held and explained that emer­gency vehi­cles had already arrived (every­one knows not to hang up on 911, right? If they haven’t answered they’ll iden­ti­fy you by caller ID and will assume the worst. Even if you’re test­ing your phone sys­tem nev­er dial 911 and hang up, always stay on the line to explain it’s a test call.)

My next thought was that if there was a fire next door that I could be in dan­ger here if the fire were to spread. I grabbed Ozzy’s car­ri­er from the clos­et, but due to all the com­mo­tion, Ozzy had decid­ed to head for where he thought he was safe: under the bed. Final­ly I got him out from under and scooped him into the car­ri­er, and by that time I could see fire­fight­ers going up the neigh­bor’s back stairs.

My upstairs neigh­bor was now in our back yard, and so I guessed that any threat to our house must have passed. I asked him about it, and sure enough, the fire was already out, but the fire­fight­ers were busy mak­ing sure that every­thing was safe on all the levels.

The fire start­ed on the back porch. The young peo­ple next door (did I just call them young peo­ple? I can’t be too far from shak­ing my cane at them from the front porch and shout­ing «get off my lawn!») have a habit of toss­ing their cig­a­rette butts. A smol­der­ing cig­a­rette is the like­ly cause.

I’m glad I quit that habit years ago, but hey: use ash­trays. If you don’t have one, they aren’t hard to impro­vise. That’s all I’ve got to say on the subject.