http://www.parakhi.com/blogs/2011/11/24/beware-inflammables

Beware, Inflammables!

Last month, when my neighbors were setting up their barbeque stand while celebrating Dasain, the flames shot out of control and in a flash, burnt most of their house down.

Our neighbor came crying asking for help, and as I rushed out, I could see thick black smoke bellowing from the top of the house into the sky. My first impulse was to help. But like others around me, without an fire extinguisher, I felt pretty much useless. Doing nothing more than extending my stress to them as if it were sympathy.

It doesn’t seem like most households in the city are equipped with the basic knowledge or equipments to prevent big fires, if they arise.

So who is the real enemy? The barbeque stand certainly wasn’t. I wouldn’t even blame the fire itself. Give it fuel, and it will innocently lap everything up.

The real enemy in this case, is plastic. By that I mean petroleum products. Whereas even 25 to 30 years ago, most of the items in our house were more or less organic, most of what we use today is synthetic, made from petroleum. And what does petroleum like to do? It loves to burn. We keep in our houses more inflammables than people before us in human history.

My neighbor, in an almost instinctive action, threw her carpet onto the barbeque stand. What was a small and controllable fire then leapt up and caught onto the fiber glass corrugated roof of her varanda. Yet another invention whipped up from petroleum. Soon enough, her AC was melting like chewing gum, and as if still insatiated, the flames blew onto the house right in front of theirs, and began to feed on their neighbors fiber glass roof as well.

After we had somehow put down the fire in the house and were trying to placate the fire in our neighbor’s heart, she mentioned how foolish it was that she’d picked up her carpet and thrown it at the barbeque stand. “Carpet pani synthetic po raichha,” she said in dismay.

And of course, it wasn’t one of those woolen Tibetan carpets Nepal is famous for. Looking around her house, we saw that most of her upholstery was made out of synthetic material. Even the cabinets in the hi-tech kitchen aren’t made up wood, but of more synthetics. It was incredibly lucky on their part that the fire spread on the outside walls of the house, and not within. Had it spread in and even caught any of the frilly objects lying around the house, the entire house would have been ravaged by flames in seconds.

And this isn’t the story of just her house. When I came back to my house and looked around, I could see that the situation is pretty much the same here. As it is in most households in Kathmandu.

We were somehow able to stop the fire. But from what I saw, without necessary precaution – please keep at least one fire extinguisher at home – even the smallest fire can do enormous damage in no time. The extinguishers we gathered from each others’ houses and used there effectively put the fire to a stop.

There were some helpful Samaritans who tried to call up the fire department, but that is about the most useless thing we can do during a fire. There was such a thick level of bureaucracy even in trying to get the relevant person to talk to that by the time we would have had a damkal come our way, the fire would either have been stopped by the community (like what happened in our case) or it would have destroyed the house entirely.

 

 

Ms. Sumi teaches English to high school students. When she isn’t in the classroom, she likes to read novels, write poems, and spend time in the kitchen. She is also a great appreciator of wildlife and considers spiders, cockroaches and leeches as some of her favorite insects.

http://www.parakhi.com/blogs/2011/11/24/beware-inflammables