My coworker decided to boil herself an egg for lunch today, and whipped out her trusty Jetboil stove.
It's a bit windy today, so naturally this trained volunteer firefighter decided that the mostly level ground didn't require the use of stabilizer legs.
When it fell over and the plastics caught fire, her finely honed rural volunteer firefighter instincts kicked in, and, ignoring the fire extinguisher she keeps in the back of the car, she sauntered up the hill to get my help.
While the pressurized isobutane cannister burned less than 3 feet away from her car.
Upon arriving I realized that I didn't want to be anywhere near it, so, using a stick, I pushed it into a muddy area and surrounded it with large rocks in the hopes of keeping any blast reasonably contained.
Since then I have just stood back, hoping it would burn itself out before it detonated, a best case scenario.
She is currently on her way to McDonalds for lunch.
When asked why she didn't use her fire extinguisher, she told me she didn't think it would be useful without being able to shut off the gas. My reply was that we could have used the fire extinguisher to remove the oxygen from the equation and extinguish the flames long enough to close the valve.
I didn't have the heart to point out that once the flame was out, the gas would just escape and with no additional ignition spark, would simply dissipate with the valve open.
By the time I found out there was a fire extinguisher available, I didn't want to use at and risk rapid cooling encouraging a rupture and subsequent bad time.
But, at least the cross got to eat her partially hard booked egg remains.
Two lessons to take away from this-
1- always use the stabilizer legs, especially when pressurized, flammable gas is involved.
2- just because someone is "trained" it doesn't mean they will be any use when the thing they trained for happens.
But let's give thanks to the Almighty that the stabilizer legs are safe in the back of her car.
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