Fire on the Range

We came in from an afternoon of appointments and shopping today and somebody put the groceries on top of the stove. I won't say who did that but it wasn't me. And then they took Benny outside and I took the trash out to the garbage can.

I walked back in the door and smelled smoke. I looked in the kitchen and saw the bags of groceries on fire, with flames shooting two feet up from the stovetop. Somehow one of the burners had come on, catching the plastic bags and their contents on fire.

I turned off the burner, grabbed a pitcher of water and dumped it on the bags. It wasn't enough. I grabbed a glass of water from the sink and dumped it on too. I yelled at Frank "We have a fire in here." Then I filled the pitcher with more water and dumped it on the remaining fire.

By the time he got inside most of the fire was out. The smell of burnt plastic filled the kitchen so as soon as all the fire was doused we turned on the exhaust fans and opened the door. Only then did the smoke alarm come on!

Frank started going through the debris of burnt groceries to see what was salvageable. Milk was pouring out the bottom of partially-burnt cartons so we had quite a mess. I took the dog back outside and tied him there to keep him away from the smoke and commotion while we cleaned it up.

It didn't take too long except for the smell of smoke, which lingered a long time in spite of our efforts at ventilating the room. Unfortunately it was freezing cold outdoors and snowing so we made the house uncomfortably cool for a while.

The soaking-wet partly-burnt groceries are in a trash can now in the middle of the paved driveway, just in case an ember should spark up again. Ben took all this fairly calmly, and we were glad that his noisy buddy Scamp was not here to add barking to the frenzy of putting out the fire.