[e_engineer]

I guess you'd want a fire at your neighbor's house to spread to yours just because your neighbor told the fire department to get lost.

He did NOT tell them to get lost. He simply wanted to stay in the house while they put the fire out. This would have endangered no one, and the last line in the article gives it away. It probably took them about 2 minutes to put the fire out.

[Catspaw]

Talk to a firefighter, will ya?

It was smoky inside the house. Unless he had the proper equipment--and I mean a tank of air & a good-fitting mask--he was at a good risk of getting smoke inhalation.

[supercat]

He did NOT tell them to get lost. He simply wanted to stay in the house while they put the fire out. This would have endangered no one, and the last line in the article gives it away. It probably took them about 2 minutes to put the fire out.

If the building was smokey, that would suggest one of two things to me [someone who knows more can tell me if my intuition is right]:

• The fire had spread somewhere outside the firebox and chimney and/or the chimney had failed, in which case it would take a lot more than two minutes to put out the fire.
• The damper to the chimney was closed and the fire had not spread, in which case the fire would likely have self-extinguished harmlessly for lack of oxygen. Even in this case, firemen would as a matter of procedure assume that a fire may have started in the walls surrounding the chimney until such time as they could prove otherwise.

BTW, I wonder who called the fire department? If the homeowner had been present when the fire started and recognized it immediately he could have closed the damper very quickly--before there was much chance for the chimney to fail or anything else to ignite. In such a case the room would have quickly filled with smoke from the fire that was in the fireplace (shutting the damper without getting lots of smoke inside the house is impossible, since fires will still smoke for awhile after they're extinguished].

[supercat]

This would have endangered no one, and the last line in the article gives it away. It probably took them about 2 minutes to put the fire out.

I don't know what words were exchanged among the participants of this dispute, but the situation is complicated by the fact that fire departments have good reason for wanting people out of the building and yet this guy had good reason for wanting to stay (among other things, to try to prevent loss of any of his collection). This attitude would be especially understandable if he'd gotten the situation under control himself and someone else called the fire fighters (not at his request).

Some situations just don't have any easy answers.

[Chancellor Palpatine]

Even worse. That endangers the lives of the firefighters unnecessarily.