This is getting to be a habit

[rachelmanija]

This weekend while driving in Pasadena I turned the corner and saw a plume of smoke. An SUV in a parking lot had flames erupting from the hood. No one was visible anywhere nearby.

I pulled over across the street, grabbed my fire extinguisher, and ran to the crosswalk. Two security guards ran up from the general direction of the burning SUV, and began stopping traffic.

I ran up to one and said, "Is anyone inside that vehicle?"

He said, "No. And I don't think you should get near it-- a fire truck is on its way, and that fire is getting bigger by the second."

I retreated across the street. There was a loud explosion from the SUV. The whole thing became enveloped in flames. The fire truck pulled up and extinguished it. They broke the windows and opened the doors, and smoke billowed out in great gray puffs. I then had a very bad moment when it occurred to me that I should have asked the guard the follow-up question, "Did you check?" But the firefighters didn't pull anyone out and I waited for quite a while, so I assume there had not been anyone inside.

When I later recounted this to Adrian (who is still in Denver), it occurred to me that perhaps burning vehicles are less uncommon than I imagined, and it is not so odd that I would have encountered this phenomenon three times.

"How many burning vehicles have you seen in your life?" I asked him.

"None," he replied. "So I leave for a week, and you get an earthquake and a flaming SUV... you just can't be left alone, can you?"

Public service announcement # 1: Vehicles do not normally catch fire following a crash! If a crashed vehicle is not burning and there are no other urgent safety hazards, do not attempt to extract the occupants or exit the vehicle! Crash victims should stay where they are and not move until medical personnell can make sure their spines are stabilized.

Public service announcement # 2: If a vehicle is already burning, especially if the engine is on fire, be aware that the fire can and probably will spread really fucking quickly. (This goes for non-vehicular fires as well.) I've now seen this happen twice. Get the hell out or get anyone inside out as fast as you can.

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Comments

[nekonexus.livejournal.com]

My first aid training is sadly lapsed (I really should remedy this), and my emergency preparedness training has mostly come from reading Jim McDonald's "Trauma and You" posts on Making Light.

I also lack fire extinguisher. >.>

However! I have seen, usually from a distance, several burning or (spectacularly) burnt out vehicles in and around the GTA. My count is kind of fuzzy. (I did not actually see the garbage truck collide with the paint truck -- the combination of which melted the asphalt off the highway -- but it was a rather freak occurrence... of the kind that seems to happen frighteningly often on the 400-series highways here in Ontario. )

[kintail.livejournal.com]

On the topic of your second question but not actually an option:

[x] Been in a car accident and injured/stuck/unable to move/forbidden to exit the vehicle by a first aider, and been TERRIFIED the vehicle was going to burst into flames which didn't help with the general terrified and freaking out, KTHX stupid TV stereotypes which I didn't know better about, HISS.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Oh, how awful. (If it was the last case, the first aider should have reassured you!)

The movie thing is a problem. Either people assume it's true and that crashed cars commonly explode, or they think that it's completely untrue and that car fires are not all that dangerous-- and neither is correct.

[calligrafiti.livejournal.com]

When I lived out in the NC countryside, I had some neighbors who were mean to their dogs. There was nothing I could get them arrested or fined for on animal cruelty grounds (I checked), but I definitely thought they sucked. They also liked old muscle cars. One day I was walking my roommate's dog along the road and saw them driving an old corvette towards their house. Smoke started pouring out from under the front hood, and then flames. They pulled over to the side and got out, watching their car burn with looks of deep sorrow on their faces. For a moment I thought I'd finally mastered setting things on fire with my mind, but as it hasn't happened since I guess it was a fluke.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

BWA-HA-HA!

[kintail.livejournal.com]

Ah, the first aider was actually excellent, but I was so panicked (and visibly injured in a way that was enough to make me lose my mind for a while all by itself) that it took me a while to understand what he was saying, nevermind trust him.

Also, the four people from the other vehicle were able to get their car doors open and walk (so they did so), and therefore the local ambulance team decided that since they "had been moved" they each had to go in the ambulance one at a time before they could come remove me from my car. According to the first aider, I was there for 53 minutes from the time he arrived until the time the ambulance finally took me away.

Which is a whole other source of bitterness and off topic, but I wanted to make clear that I meant *no* criticism to the first aider who was a real hero to whom I am incredibly grateful. Unfortunately I wasn't in any state to be able to remember his name. :(

[edit: dang typos!]

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

My most notable burning vehicle experience happened when I was a kid: the family International Harvester truck (a proto-SUV) spontaneously caught fire in the parking lot of a mall at Christmas time. Nothing like coming out and finding that the reason for all the excitement is you!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I've seen two cars on fire and thought mine was on fire at one point. Mine was when some gauge or other in mine cracked, causing something else to break when it got overheated, and steam to pour forth from my vehicle when I was trapped in rush-hour traffic. Terrified, I managed to pull over off the road a few minutes later and threw myself and everything I needed (purse, phone, iPod, books) out of the car and called roadside assistance. Eventually it stopped, and I realized it probably wasn't going to catch on fire (the difference between steam and smoke not exactly being apparent when you're terrified and trapped in traffic), and got back into the car to get out of the sun while waiting for the tow truck.

One car on fire was just on the side of the road, and the other was in Nairobi. I was in a taxi driving to downtown, and looked down a street as we passed it at breakneck speed and saw a blue car with flames roaring up out of it that were, I think, the height of the two-story building it was next to. If someone told me it had been firebombed instead of catching on fire by itself, I'd believe it. (There was nothing about firebombings in the newspaper the next day, but I don't know how much control of the press the Tanzanian government has.)

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

I have pulled over to fight a brush fire. As did three other people.

Which doesn't actually count, of course, but it did seem like a good idea at the time, and the firefighters thought it was pretty cool that a couple of us actually had fire extinguishers.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I was also in Denver when a car there was struck by lighting during 5-o'clock traffic and set on fire. Did not see it, alas, as it was not on my commute home, but I remember hearing it on the news.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

My one flaming vehicle was something I saw while speeding like the dickens somewhere on the network of highways around New York City. It was dusk, and that tricky part of dusk when your eyes just feel dim but you're not smart enough to turn your lights on yet, and I whipped past a flaming elderly shmoozemobile pulled over by the side of an exit.

I know I was speeding because (a) I saw it and it was gone, that fast; and (b) sitting right next to it was a police car and I was so going to be busted. Except that there was a car on fire and that was more important.

...But I had to look for it in my rearview to make sure my mind wasn't playing tricks on me. Except for the whole property-destruction-and-mayhem, kind of a lovely weird liminal experience.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Dude, cool!

[em-h.livejournal.com]

I picked 3 rather than 1 in response to the first question because I've mostly been in post-war and near-war zones rather than war zones as such. So I've seen burnt-out vehicles, but never any that were in the actual process of burning.

In fact, I don't think I've ever seen a non-deliberate, non-controlled fire in person, leaving aside tiny things like flaming pans in kitchens. I've dealt with some reasonably dramatic situations including arterial bleeding (not my own), but fire and I don't seem to be drawn to each other.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

It was in the oleanders in the empty lot across from the convenience store on the corner near my house in North Las Vegas.

So there was some self-interest involved.

But you know. Brush fire! How often does that happen?

(I'm pretty sure somebody flicked a cigarette out the window into the desert lot, and it smoldered in the roots for days before bursting forth in two-foot flames and billows of smoke. Some people.)

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Totally surreal. Mythology aside, cars don't really burn all that much.

I have seen them twice. Both times alongside highways. (Actually, one was immediately post-burning.)

However, there was a fatal head-on collision a block from my old house (in the same intersection where I had the brush fire experience, synchronistically!) where both cars burst into flames, and a bystander managed to pull one of the drivers (the drunk who caused the accident, so it happens) to safety. The passengers in the other car died.

Rachel, does smoke count? Because I was caught in a massive traffic jam once (also in Vegas) when a tanker truck rolled over under a bridge overpass and burned. I never actually saw the fire, but everybody in southern Nevada saw the plume... *g*

[ckd]

I've been in a similar situation to your "thought it was on fire"; we were visiting my grandmother, and her car suddenly started spewing what looked like smoke but was actually steam while we were stopped at a light.

My mother practically threw my brother and me out of the car.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

* And I just realized I typed "Tanzanian" when I meant "Kenyan." *headdesk*

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yeah, It wasn't until later that I realized if it was smoke, I would have been able to smell it and it probably would have been much darker. But better safe than sorry, at any rate.

[ckd]

React first. Cogitate later. If it isn't a fire, all you'll feel is mildly silly. (I just finished reading Amanda Ripley's The Unthinkable. Very good book on disasters and how people react to/during them. Highly recommended.)

[cofax7]

I was walking the dog a few months ago and spotted a car where the windows were... weirdly foggy. Yellow-brown fog, and I realized after a minute that the car was on fire. So I banged on the house door several times, no response, eventually found a neighbor to call 911. When the fire truck showed up, THEN the owner of the car came to the door--he'd been sleeping upstairs and somehow hadn't heard the fuss.

Interesting and unsettling both.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the rec! *puts on Amazon wishlist*

I got to subsume my feeling-silly with feelings of RAAAGE when I noticed that I was pulled over with my hood open in the universal sign for MY CAR IS BROKE on the access road next to a road that exited from a country club, and I was passed by many, many people in SUVs turning onto the access road from the club and only one of them even rolled down a window and asked if I needed help.

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

If you spend enough time commuting in the Bay Area, you will eventually see a burning vehicle. I think I've only seen one, and it was from a distance. Left some remarkable scorch marks on the stone sound wall along I-4, though!

I got close enough to a burning trailer home (in Arkansas, of course) to feel the heat billowing off of it. Gah. That put more fear of fire into me than anything else--it's hard to appreciate the sheer power of a fire till you get close to one. The erstwhile residents were standing around outside. We asked if they needed help, and they said they were OK and help was on the way.

I did come home on Halloween once to find that no, really, those fire trucks headed up my street? Going to my wooden Victorian deathtrap house. Trick or treat!

[copperwise.livejournal.com]

I used to deliver the local paper in a smaller town, driving rural roads all night. The Oregonian carrier overlapped my route. He was crazy and drove like an idiot. One night we came across him, parked by the side of the road, flames shooting out of the engine compartment of his truck. The freakin' idiot was trying to rescue all of his bundles of newspapers from the truck. E.F. and a second passerby who stopped had to physically restrain him while I called 911. The entire truck was engulfed within another minute. Fire truck arrived just as gas tank exploded.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

One of my shitmobiles started smoking from the steering column once. I had to pull over into the fast lane emergency lane and park on the 405 with my one year old daughter. This was before cell phones.

I have had two shitmobiles suddenly go into the red zone when the cooling system failed, and begin steaming and smoking. As always, I was stuck alone on the freeway for many hours and no rescue.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I've only seen burning vehicles a couple times, but I've driven a car that started to smoke from beneath the hood. That was decidedly unnerving.