Homemade Fireball
A an old coworker of mine was a volunteer firefighter. He used to tell me all sorts of stories about the job and it was fairly common for him to enter peoples homes. One story that definitely stood out to me was about a time he entered this one families house.
It was a rental house where the smoke alarms were actually hooked to a central system that went straight to the fire department. He said this is fairly common with off-campus college rental housing as well.
Well, the smoke alarm went off one day in this particular house and in addition to that they got two calls from neighbors who smelled and saw smoke coming from this house.
He and his guys arrive to find that these idiots were attempting to deep fry a turkey in a giant home made deep fryer in their basement… Sure enough a fireball erupted and lit the drop ceiling on fire for a period of time..
He said the basement was cluttered as all get out too with all sorts of flammable stuff and in addition the drop ceiling was noticeably lower than a standard ceiling.
The fire was somehow out and the deep fryer off by the time they got there but he said that was the only time ever that he actually yelled at someone for being an idiot. He didn’t hold back and didn’t feel bad about it later. He just couldn’t handle how moronic those people were.
Even if the deep fryer didn’t emit a fireball, the heat from all that surely would’ve started it’s own fire and messed up all sorts of things on its own.
He said one of the factors of him ripping into these people was that in this particular housing development the houses were like 1-2 feet apart so if this house fully went up in flames, they’d be dealing with a multi-house fire in no time.
Apparently the fire got put out by a neighbor who heard the commotion and saw the smoke coming out of the basement window from their kitchen window 2 feet away and ran over with a fire extinguisher. These morons didn’t even have a fire extinguisher in the house.. Story credit: Reddit / HughJa55ole