Burning Down the Dorm

Thursday night my friend Emily and I decided to make tacos for dinner. The kitchen in our dorm is a community kitchen, so we took all our stuff down stairs. We put a couple taco shells in the toaster oven and redirected our attention to the meat on the stove. Now normally we can leave the shells in the toaster oven for a couple minutes, but something was very wrong with it and when we turned around the shells were black. We hurried and turned it off and kind of laughted at how black they were, but also because we didn't know why they burned. As we stood staring at shells debating when we should clean out the toaster oven the toaster oven lit on fire. We still kept our cool and decide to close the door to it remove the oxygen from the inside. Well, it didn't work, the flames just kept getting bigger. At the point we realized that we couldn't put it out on our own, the situation became very serious. Emily hurried and unplugged it as we were all searching for a fire extinguisher, but it was no where to be found. I ran to the front desk and said somewhat calmly, "uh, there's a fire in the kitchen and we can't find a fire extinguisher, do you know where one is?" The main person on duty was on her dinner break to go get some soup for about 7 minutes. I ran back into the kitchen and saw a fire extinguisher holding the kitchen door open. By the time I got it to the fire the flames were about 3-4ft high and the entire toaster oven was engulfed in flames. As far as the fire extinguisher goes, while I was looking for one, a guy found one around the corner, not even close to the stove or anything. We were all looking at each other trying to figure out who was going to do it, and Emily and I were trying to figure out how to use it. Finally the kid came over with his extinguisher and put the fire out. Powder flew everywhere smothering the flames. At that point Emily grabbed her stuff and got the heck out of dodge, and I has to deal with the situation. Now you have to understand, I'm an RA at the dorm, so I had to actually deal with the whole thing. Within a few minutes after putting it out the fire alarms went off and 3 firetrucks came with probably15-20 firefighters. The whole building had to evacuate and in the meantime, we were trying to get a hold of our building manager present to come deal with them, but we couldn't reach him because, as we found out later, he was in the shower on the 10th floor, so he couldn't smell the smoke or hear the alarms. A lot of the students didn't believe that there was an actual fire, but not only that the ones who did hear the alarms thought it was one of their neighbors playing video games or laser tag. So all in all, my adrenaline didn't sign off until I went to bed. Four hours later I think might heart rate was still up. On Friday I had my weekly meeting with my boss and she said she saw the security tape of the whole thing and couldn't help but laugh at silent footage of people's arms flailing, trying to figure out how to work the fire extinguisher, me running to the front desk, and the flames growing larger and larger by the second, and in addition to that having the flames be inches away from the electrical box. (don't ask me what the electrical box is located right above a cooking area) As funny as it is, now, I realize that in an emergency and under pressure you need to know exactly where fire extinguishers are and how to use them. Thank goodness it was put out before it got any worse because there could have been some serious damage to the building and all of us involved. If you take anything from this post, take a good laugh and make sure you actually go through the procedure of a fire extinguisher with your family. It might seem self explanatory, but it not in the heat of the moment:) haha .