Fire

Readers,

How would you respond if there was a fire in your house?

By God's grace, I have never been in a house when a fire has broken out. However, recently a fire flared up in the kitchen of my parents house.

Fortunately no-one was harmed and no property was damaged (except the toaster!), but a valuable lesson was learnt by me.

For those interested, the cause of the fire was a croissant getting stuck in the toaster and overcooking to the point where a high flame began to soar from the toaster.

My parents house had a fire blanket which was used to good effect and the fire was safely extinguished before causing any further damage to the house or any of my family inside.

The thing is that when I heard this story, I thought about what would have happened if it was my kitchen.

I didn't own a fire blanket and had never been taught or even thought about how to respond to a fire.

Of course at previous jobs, I knew where the fire alarms, fire extinguishers, fire doors and assembly points were. However for my home, I had never thought about it.

After what happened though, I have purchased a fire blanket and a fire extinguisher and watched a few short YouTube videos guiding on how to use them.

Then I got to thinking..... How many of my friends and family have fire blankets and extinguishers in their homes? How many know how to operate them?

If only one reader of this post is motivated to go out and buy the necessary equipment and learn how to use it, my work is done.

I pray that no-one reading this ever finds them in a situation where they need to know how to put out a fire.
However I also pray that everyone reading is motivated enough to invest a small amount of time and money to learn just in case it does happen.

If the fire in my parents house and this post about it motivates even a handful of people to take fire safety more seriously, then that toaster was a very cheap sacrifice.

You could learn about fire safety and never need to utilise the knowledge or you could neglect to learn and I will leave the rest to your imagination.

God bless