Darwin award winner to date.............

I'm sure that everyone is familiar with the Darwin awards, you know the award given to the " brightest"person, the one who does something so outrageous,you wonder if Darwin was right. The other day we get a call for a structure fire,upon arrival we find a double wide home, single wide home and a large storage shed/barn, and about 2.5 acres on fire, we also have two power lines down, and oh by the way, the wind is blowing at a steady 12-14 mph. well the Chief gets to the scene first w/ our 3000 gal pumper tanker and I follow shortly after with our 1200 gal engine. we call for extra tankers and personel form our neighboring county, in addition to our automatic mutual aid. We get the fires out and forestry gets a break plowed around the brush fire, and the power company gets the downed lines secured. The chief and I,both being trained fire investigators, get to looking for the cause and origin, and after talking w/ the family, we find out that one of the family members lit a fire in a " burn" barrel and then just left it. They didn't watch it, they didn't care that the wind was blowing and the humidity was low......... they just lit it and left it. Well this to me is proof that Darwin might have been right about natural selection and survival of the fittest.Oh, by the way, the barrel was in the middle of all three structures.

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Permalink Reply by John Schander on April 2, 2009 at 1:48pm

Just goes to show that you have to be smarter than the stuff you're working with .

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Permalink Reply by John L. VanAuken on April 2, 2009 at 2:13pm

Ok heres one when I was a kid, my home towns dept got called to a fire at a local CoOp fuel station. Turns out a person getting ready to go camping pulled in to fill there propaine tanks on there over head camper. They just happend to leave the pilot light on, well it of course started a fire. While the firedept was trying to keep the propaine tank cool as well as get the fully engulfed pickup and camper out. A man decides to pull up right next to where the fire is and proceed to fill his car while smoking a cig. Now that takes brains, even as a kid knew that was stupid. Oh dident mention that the fuel area is aprox 50 feet or less from the fire.