Morning about a year ago, I was still in bed. My mom started screaming in shock and surprise, and yelled for me to come quick. This kind of reaction isn’t too uncommon from her for relatively mundane things (like a cockroach) so I wasn’t in that much of a hurry.

As I slowly got up and exited my room, suddenly I was breathing smoke. Apparently, she left a pot with oil in it on the stovetop which had turned on somehow. The pot had a lid on, but large amounts of smoke were escaping around it.

If I remember correctly, I rushed to open the window closest to the stovetop and made sure the stove was turned off and the pot was away from new heat, and then the smoke was overwhelming me so I ran back to the other side of the apartment to catch some breath. I was also going to bring over a fan to push out the smoke as much as possible, to make it tolerable to be in the room and deal with the emergency.

While I was away doing that, my dad had come down the stairs and into the kitchen and, in his infinite wisdom*, opened the pot lid to see what was going on underneath it. Then I hear him yell “fire!” and he goes out to grab the fire extinguisher. By opening the lid, he allowed oxygen to get inside and thus fuel the fire.

I quickly rushed back to the kitchen and saw the fire in the pot. My dad was already back with the extinguisher (it was just outside our apartment door). But he couldn’t figure out how to use it. I grabbed it, aimed it at the flaming pot, and extinguished the fire.

Fire is out, emergency over.

I got a little bit of splashback from the flaming oil which gave me a small burn on my finger (which healed just fine, I don’t even remember which finger it was and there’s no scar), and the extinguisher made a giant mess that needed to be cleaned all over the area, but overall I’d say damage was close to minimal. Close to minimal.

My first plan, when I saw the pot with the lid on, was to keep it starving for oxygen and prepare a “bath” of cold water to place the whole pot into to cool it until it stops smoking. If my dad hadn’t opened the lid, I think that plan would have worked, and would have saved us the cleanup and the burn on my finger (though I might have gotten burned another way, who knows).

After I saw that he had opened the lid, my instinct was still to put the lid back on and go back to plan A, which would have been tricky since the lid itself is obviously too hot to touch bare-handed and the fire in the pot makes it hard to get close. But still, I think it was doable.

But when seconds later he was already back with the extinguisher, I knew it was not the best solution, but I also knew that it would work, and that trying to convince him that it wasn’t the best idea would take way too long. In that moment, just accepting the sub-optimal extinguisher plan was the best choice. Oh well, it did work.

* I’m not actually that mad, In an emergency situation it’s hard to blame someone for not thinking things through, and doing an instinctive thing. Still, I expected more of him, he’s a smart man with over 60 years of life experience and you’d think he knew not to let fire get oxygen.