LetLucia

Growing up, I was taught that when using a gas cooker, it would be much safer to light the match first before turning on the gas. That way, the gas is lit immediately it comes out of the burner, rather than building up and causing a fire if you were to light the match after turning the gas on. I wrote a post on fire safety here . Look that up also. Gas is highly combustible and naturally odorless! Because of this odorless nature, these gases are mixed with odorants such as Hydrogen Sulfide or Ethyl Mercaptan so that they can be detected with the sense of smell. This way, one can tell when there’s a leak. In a household setting, you’d find either natural gas, methane, propane or butane gas…the smelly ones of course. Gas explosions occur when the gas plus air mixture reaches a critical value, at which any spark, flame, or heat source can ignite. As the gas burns in a confined space with little ventilation, the pressure builds until it goes BOOM...which is almost immediately ...

                                                 It’s all fun and games till you meet a burn survivor. At Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, it was fire safety awareness week last week, and we had two burn survivors as guest speakers. They survived an arson fire that happened in their dorm in Seton Hall University, New Jersey, in the year 2000. Their names are Alvaro and Shawn, and they were two eighteen year old college freshmen who were one of the 58 people to get burned that fateful morning. By God’s grace, they pulled through and lived to tell the story. 3 students died as a result of the incident, and 4 out of the 58 students and fire fighters were severely burned, including Alvaro and Shawn. You can read more about the story here . I decided to write an article on fire safety based on what I learned from Alvaro and Shawn’s story. The...

     You know what a hoverboard is, right? Those segway lookalikes without handles? Well, some techy guys can’t get over the fact that they are called ‘hoverboards’ because they do not actually hover a.k.a suspend a.k.a don’t-touch-the-ground-at-all? But hey, some of us want to be in our own Back to the Future movie. Let’s cut right to it! These cool  hoverboards  have since become a thing of concern because they can spontaneously combust! Yeah, like actually cause a fire hazard.