By Kathlean Wolf
Northside News
The fire alarm went off as I was doing the dishes. It came from the hallway between apartments — false alarm? I opened the door to find a hallway filling with smoke. I headed downstairs, closing my door behind me. On the first floor, my neighbor stood just outside his door, a steadily increasing cloud of smoke pouring out around him. “Do you have a fire extinguisher?” he yelled, panicky.
I backtracked to the red box between floors and took the extinguisher out, pulling the pin to release the handle. “It’s in the kitchen!” my neighbor said, gesturing. I turned the corner into the smoky apartment to see flames jumping from a pot on the stove. More alarming, something beside the pot had already caught on fire. A short burst at the base of the flame put it out, but the oil in the pan re-ignited immediately. I kept at it, shooting down the grease-fire three more times before it stayed out.
Acrid smoke pushed me out of the apartment for a moment, onto the snow-covered lawn to breathe clean air. Then, clutching the extinguisher like a lifeline, I headed back in, worried the fire might flare up again. Bowing low beneath the smoke, I found a Pyrex pan beside the neighbor’s sink, and used it to cover the top of the pan, blocking off the air supply. I returned to the clean air outside. The fire department arrived a minute later. Even when a fire is out, there can be sources of ignition waiting to spring back to life; one firefighter brought out a charred and smoldering item, unrecognizable, and stomped on it in the snow. The danger had passed.
I’ve had safety training on many subjects since I was a little child. My mother was a nurse; we learned first aid and CPR the way some children learned multiplication tables. There were earthquake drills and fire drills, which my father’s job as a photographer for put into special focus every time he was assigned to cover a natural disaster. Our favorite vacation activity of backpacking high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains was a natural education on being prepared to care for myself with minimal equipment for several days in a row. In Wisconsin, I’ve added tornadoes to my list of things to prepare for. Over time, it’s become second nature to prepare both mentally and physically for any number of emergencies.
Nature doesn’t really seem to have it in for Wisconsin, compared with California, Florida or Mississippi. Yet as my recent experience with a minor kitchen fire illustrates, things go wrong in times and places we cannot predict. The first step in being prepared is awareness; knowing what can go wrong, we can run through the potential scenarios and develop a plan, collect supplies to handle an emergency, and practice the skills we’ll need to handle them.
In the April/May edition of the Northside News, look for more information about classes and presentations to increase disaster preparedness for residents of the Northside. In the meantime, check out the Red Cross website, redcross.org, as well as ReadyWisconsin.wi.gov, for great preparedness resources.