To create fire, you need a formula. Oxygen+Heat+fuel or combustible material=Fire. Tonight it’s pretty cold where I am, and the fire heating the house sure does make it more comfortable. In fact, I’d be pretty miserable without it. I remember when I was young and my family would go camping. We had one of those old Puma pop up campers, Dad and I could set it up in 5 minutes or less. Sometimes of an evening for a treat, we had a little campfire and roasted marshmallows and made s’mores. They sure did help us keep warm on some of the cool evenings. And I must say, they’re part of some lovely memories for me now.
But sometimes fires can get out of control, destroying homes, businesses, land and lives. If you have the proper tool, sometimes you can intervene while waiting for the fire department to show up and save your ____________________. Please pick applicable noun.
To do this intervention, you must first have the proper tool, which means you must know what tool to use in which circumstance. You can not treat a wood fire like you do an electrical fire or grease fire. No no. That turns out badly.
So let’s look at what type of tool to use for what type of fire.
Isn’t it interesting how there is no “one size fits all” approach to handling the same problem “fire”? But you also need to know how to use the fire extinguisher. It does no good at all to stand there holding it in your hands reading the directions as family photos passed down for years go up in flames. No, you need to have that bit sorted ahead of time. It’s as though you almost need to train to handle emergencies. Here’s a handy acronym I was taught.
P—Point
A—Aim
S—Squeeze
S—Sweep
Point the nozzle of the extinguisher at the BASE of the fire, aim to direct your spray of chemical and squeeze the handle sweeping the nozzle from side to side at the base of the flames.
So what’s with the Johnny Gage and Roy DeSoto impersonations?
Well, as my teammate Bear pointed out in his last column
…I haven’t seen a single call for banning the private possession of fire extinguishers. No one has screamed that zoning laws and building codes didn’t work (and apparently were actively ignored by authorities) and should be repealed.
No one raises an eyebrow over having different types of fire extinguishers, or being set up to handle different types of fire. Or even having the knowledge that there are different types of fire. When it comes to having a shotgun for hunting or killing varmints in the barn or chicken house, a rifle for killing them in the pasture and no matter how much I love those two, they will not fit in my purse, so a handgun for self defense? Why, to those in the mainstream media, or NYC that there is one of those so called “arsenals”. Who could possibly need all those guns, three of them? Well, three types. But I feel I need the three types for different situations, just like different fire extinguishers are needed for different fires. Different threats, different tools.
Just as it is not the tool, the gun itself, that is a threat, but who holds the gun, the lovely s’more generating fire that gives us a tasty family treat, can also destroy and kill. In fact, it can be used as a weapon of mass destruction.
In addition to the Oakland fire, there has been one in Tennessee. This resulted in 14 deaths in the Gatlinburg area and damage to over 1,700 structures. 700 homes and businesses were destroyed or damaged, including 300 inside the Gatlinburg city limits. The fires were spurred by dry conditions and high winds. More than 14,000 residents were displaced as the fires burned and more than 15,000 acres were incinerated.
Two juveniles were arrested. No names have been given. They were not from the Gatlinburg area, but they are from Tennessee. So I got curious. There is apparently an islamic guest house in Gatlinburg. Who’d a thunk it? But they aren’t from that area. I wonder if they are from Murfreesboro? Two hundred and four miles away, in case you wondered. Reading some of the comments under some of the articles I saw that some of the other readers had the same thoughts go through their heads.
But why would I have such thoughts? Well, it’s most likely because of what happened in Israel last week. Something called the “Fire Intifada”. The cost has been fearful for the small Jewish state.
More than two hundred fires were sparked in Israel. Part of the problem is that it has been dry and was windy, and that did help spread the fires. One hundred thousand Israelis had to flee their homes, and while there were no deaths, one hundred and twenty-two were treated for injuries. Seven hundred homes were damaged or destroyed in the one thousand seven hundred seventy three fires, twenty of which were major. Thirty-two thousand acres burned, twenty-eight thousand acres in Haifa alone. Four of the fires burning Haifa started in different parts of the city at the same time. I’m sure this was on the news nightly, right? Actually if the failing networks known as cnn and mslsd had covered it, it would have been something along the lines of “Cruel Israeli police and military stop arab youth from starting campfire to make s’mores and keep warm”.
But it did have a big coverage of twitter. The hashtag Israel is burning was very popular. That was the tag used by the gleeful arabs praying for Israel and the Zionists to burn to the ground. An iman in Canada was publicly asking allah to burn all of Israel to the ground. Deputy Defense Minister Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan believed that part of the fires were arson. Israeli police have arrested thirty-seven suspects in the fire intifada, some of which are Israeli arabs. A former Shin Bet heads, Israeli Hasson remarked this was the first time Falestinians had used a “weapon of mass destruction.”
During the fires, many countries sent firefighting crews and equipment to help the beleaguered Israeli crews. PM Netanyahu requested of Russia’s President Putin aid, and Putin responded he would immediately send giant planes to help. Greece, Italy, Croatia, Russia, Cyprus, and Turkey also sent aid to help in the battle. Even the Falestinian Authority sent crews to help. As one radio host pointed out, that was only fair since Falestinians set some of them. Notice who is not on the list? Right, the U.S. I howled on Twitter for a couple days that I could not believe we had nothing we could send that would help. As it turned out I was right, we did send a supertanker a few days into the firestorm. What I believe is different about the American aid sent, is that it came with a price tag. obama charged Israel one and a half million dollars for the use of the supertanker. Which is disgusting as whenever there is a disaster that strikes anywhere in the world Israel is one of the first to respond to offer aid and show up.
There are efforts underway to help Israelis replant the trees lost in the conflagration through the efforts of Zo Artzeinu. There is a little movie on the web site showing some footage shot by them during the fire, and the resulting damage. And yes, I’m getting trees.
It seems that what happens in Israel, is reflected in the US later. Sometimes not much later at all. That is partly why I wonder about the genesis of the fire in Tennessee. That and the fact Al Qaeda urged them to unleash hell with fires. Admittedly an old article, but that doesn’t mean that it will be forgotten or ignored.
Something else I head in the radio program was pretty interesting to me as well. In the Tanakh there is a section called Kings or מלכים or M’lakhim. I’ll give you a short story from M’lakhim 3:16-28. It’s a story of two prostitutes, each who had a baby boy. One of the babies died in the night and that mother switched her dead baby with the living baby of the other woman. The two women came before King Solomon for him to settle the dispute. The King’s response? Bring him a sword, he was going to divide the live baby and give each woman half. The real mother cried out not to kill the baby, but instead give him to the other woman. The woman who claimed the baby but had no actual love for him was fine with this solution and said go ahead. With that the wise king gave the baby to the first woman.
Because the woman claimed the child as hers but had no actual love for him, she was willing to see him put to death and burned to the ground killing all living things in the land, and trying to kill the land itself. Trees, vineyards, groves of fruit trees, innocent animals and people. Those lives had no meaning to her.
But to the woman who’s child it really was? Who bore the child, nursed it and loved it? She was willing to do anything to save it’s life. Including giving her to the other woman, calling President Putin and asking for help and paying barry one and a half million dollars for a supertanker that would have been given freely to any arab country that would have asked for it. She would do anything to save it because she loved it just that much.
