Don't throw your cigarette butt in the flower pot

[dradtke]

My daughter Devon went to her first house fire early Saturday morning. She was on her way into work when the call came over her pager, and she made it to the station in time to go out on the second truck. Some of the crew from the first truck went in the house, but were called back out when the roof started to collapse. Devon was on the nozzle for awhile, spraying the roof. After the fire was under control, she went inside with some others to knock out hot spots, and saw a litter box in one corner. Everyone in the house got out, but nobody knew what happened to the cat.

The fire started because the homeowner threw a cigarette butt in a flower pot filled with mulch on the deck. It smoldered, then the fire climbed up the wall and caught the roof on fire. Since most of the fire happened on the roof, the basement was untouched. Down there you wouldn't have known there'd been a fire.

The next day a fire crew went back to look for the cat. They found it alive. Best guess is that it hid in the basement. They reunited it with the family.

A few weeks ago, a cop in the same town prevented a similar fire. Driving down a street, he saw a light where a light shouldn't be. He checked it out, and found a flower pot on fire next to the front door. Kicked it away, called the fire department, then put it out with an extinguisher from his car. It took a lot of pounding on the door to wake up the woman inside. If he hadn't been driving by, the house would have gone up and she would have gone up with it.

Devon said flower pot fires are actually fairly common.

[Fingerplucked]

I didn't know flower pots were so combustible.  Then again, I didn't know people threw cigarette butts in flower pots.

It doesn't apply to me either way. The only way I could get in trouble is if I had electronic flowers.

[dradtke]

I think the real message is "Water your damn flowers."

[millring]

If you throw an e cigarette into a flower pot, it could start an electrical fire.

[Fingerplucked]

If you smoke an e-cigarette while reading an e-book you should pause occasionally to smell the e-flowers. But if you don't have an e-pot to e-piss in, it's not necessarily a bad e-thing.

[iamjohnne]

We kept a flower pot full of kitty litter on the porch for cigarette butts. One night someone put a butt in the pot and the old butts in the pot caught fire. We didn't find out until the next morning when the pot was burned. We got ceramic pots after that. Now there is a metal bucket on my porch for cigarette butts.

[Deleted]

"Now there is a metal bucket on my porch for cigarette butts."

That's my kind of house! Not that I'd root around for the long ones, oh no.

[Village Idiot]

You know those tall thing things in front of stores that people throw their butts in instead of an ashtray filled with sand or cat litter? I saw one of those about a year ago smoldering, black smoke coming out of the hole on top, in front of a convenience store in Vinton. I notified the folks in the store and they pretty much shrugged their shoulders. I assume it eventually went out, as the store never burned down.