42 Times A House Burned Down Because Of Stupid People, Stupid Decisions And Stupid Coincidences

I worked for a restoration company. A family cut a small tree down and tried to stuff it up their fireplace to burn. The flute was so crammed with leaves that smoke started to fill the living room. They tried to pull the tree out and that's when it REALLY caught fire. They tried to pull it out of the house, they got as far as the front door. All of them had 2nd/3rd degree burns on their hands/arms and the fire destroyed the front room and entry way of their house. The insurance company asked us if we thought it was a case of fraud, and we told them "No these people are just really stupid".

My partner’s a firefighter.

He said the dumbest one was where a man tried to barbecue in his basement.

His reasoning?

“I don’t want to go outside and risk exposure to Coronavirus. It would be safer to do it here in the basement.”.

My Dad was a firefighter, and he once went to a house fire that was started by the old lady who lived there. She liked to burn candles, but didn't like the wax buildup that would form in the cavity, so she would soak up the liquid wax with a napkin. She was doing this when she accidentally brushed a wax soaked napkin up against the flame. She panicked and threw the napkin into the trash . . . where all the other wax napkins were. As the trashcan exploded into flames she fled the house, but not before she went to her oxygen tanks and FLOODED THE HOUSE WITH PURE OXYGEN, because she thought that it would smother the fire.

A roomba knocked a scented candle over and set fire to the rest of the room. The guy said he knew the roomba did it because he watched the whole thing happen, but didn't do anything because he thought it was funny.

My father was a Boston Firefighter for 30+ years. One of his more memorable stories was a foreign family who had ripped up their cast iron bathtub, and built an open flame underneath the tub. They used the tub as a giant oil fryer.

Naturally this didn't work out very well and the house caught fire.

To add to the insanity even more, the family absolutely refused to let my dad and his coworkers in without taking their boots off. Which of course, they couldn't agree too.

Just crazy.

I *am* a firefighter but this wasn't in my district. A guy was attempting to forge a sword in a burn barrel in an alley, based on something he watched on the History Channel. The embers from the "forge" lit up the building he lived in and destroyed 3 multi family residential buildings.

Mister Homeowner was attempting to deep fry tater tots in a sauce pan of oil on a gas stove. The oil frothed up when the frozen tots hit the surface, igniting the whole thing. Mister Homeowner then proceeded to try to grab the pan by the handle and swing it over to the sink. I imagine it was like a Vietnam era napalm run. Well, he managed to spread the fire across the linoleum floor and in panic, let go of the pan, launching it, the remaining burning oil, and tots into the laundry basket which was full of freshly dried clothes. In the ensuing panic Mister Homeowner thought he could try to get the flaming laundry basket out to the back porch. Well, he only managed to knock the flaming basket off the table and it tumbled off the table and strait down the basement stairs leaving a nice trail of burning oil soaked towels all the way down.


Now Mister Homeowner decides to make egress out the back kitchen door, down the stairs to the back yard. He slightly missed the stairs, hit his bare right foot on one the railing posts, breaking a couple toes, and flew forward off the staircase managing to impale himself onto a bit of rebar that was protruding from a cement block they were using as a sort of barrier on the edge of the cement patio. There he stayed, clad only in boxer shorts. He managed to nick his liver pretty bad (but survived). Did I mention he had burned his legs up pretty bad as well?


So, the smells and smoke and the screams of Mister Homeowner, at finding himself stuck through with a rusty piece of iron, alerted Big Mamma, Mister Homeowner's Girlfriend, and Punk Teen Kids Number One and Two upstairs that something was afoot. As far as we could tell, Mamma went looking for the kids or the dogs (both dogs made it out). Girlfriend made it out and down the stairs (over the raging laundry/oil fire one flight below). She found Mister Homeowner on the back patio, bleeding and turning gray, screaming and trying to get off the pike.


The Punk Teen Kids (with the dogs) climbed out a side bedroom window to the side porch roof. The older Punk Teen Kid (about 16 years of age) managed to tumble off. He didn't land well. I think he ended up breaking his arm really bad. The dogs and the younger one got pulled off that roof by the neighbors.


Mamma apparently had a significant cardiac event and fell over. She happened to do so in "the junk room" - a sort of Collyer Brothers style room filled shoulder high with stacked boxes of junk. By the time we got in there, it was just a charred, soaked mess of black slop about waist deep. We had to dig Mamma out of it. That was wretched.

All of this had attracted the attention of the many foreign laborers who were living in the boarding house next door. They helped the best they could but also became a very raucous audience. A few of them were bomberos voluntarios back in Guatemala and having an entire company of mostly non-English speaking vollies show up intent on going to work made things VERY interesting. Two of those guys saved Mister Homeowner's life though.



I have never, in my 27 years of doing this, arrived on a scene of such screaming and chaos.

My neighbors recently burned their house down emptying an ashtray before they went to bed.

They have since quit smoking.

A fairly common one, but the response was interesting!

Early February, Western PA. Guy's pipes freeze on the coldest day of the year, -8F.

He tries to thaw them with a propane torch. Sets the wall on fire.

Tries to put the fire out. Fails. Finally calls 911.

Fire Chief is 1/2 block away. Is on-scene in under a minute. Basement is fully involved, main floor catching.

First engine arrives in under 5 minutes. Doors are blocked by fire, exterior attack only.

I'm on an attack line, spraying water into the 2nd-floor window. After 40 minutes, another firefighter comes to relieve me, but since I'd been getting backspray, I'm frozen to the ground. He has to pull me loose.

2 hours later, we have it knocked down. The insurance adjuster shows up. Asst. Chief explains what started the fire.

Adjuster replies, "Oh, yeah, we know. It's OK, we insure for Stupid!"

(Nobody got hurt. Family gets a much nicer house out of the deal.).

In college a girl in the dorms was making popcorn which (not sure how but somehow) caught fire in the microwave. She didn't want to get into trouble for it so she grabbed the flaming bag of popcorn and threw it into the nearby trashcan. Then proceeded to *cover the fire with paper towels* to "smother" it. She actually thought it would work.

It did not work. I came back exhausted after work to find the dorm building surrounded by firetrucks.

Family friend decided to make major renovations on their home with no background in construction/carpentry. They also didn’t bring a professional to ensure that their renovations were up to fire code. Low and behold an exposed wire sparked a fire in the middle of the night and burned down their entire home. They have 3 kids and are very fortunate they all were able to escape the fire without any injuries. To make matters even worse, they had no house insurance (extreme libertarians that don’t believe in insurance/debt) so they ended up having to rely on a GoFundMe fundraiser (set up by a relative) to recover financially. Last I heard, they were still living in a hotel trying to figure out their next plan of action.

This story alone reaffirms my belief that somethings are better left to the professionals. Even if you’re trying to cut costs, it might be best to pay a little extra to have someone with experience do something for you instead. This avoids terrible situations like this.

Maybe not the *dumbest* I've seen but the one that comes immediately to mind:

Guy lived in a trailer. Small window broke. He replaced it with a convex piece of glass he salvaged from an old TV. The sun hit at the right time of day, at the right time of the year, and magnified it to a point. That point was a stack of newspapers.

Was in my local paper, turned out to be my friends older brother. He tried to smoke out bees in the loft and set fire to the insulation in the loft and burnt the whole house down.

My Dad is a retired firefighter, and will always remember the Thanksgiving where he went on 10 calls in a 24 hour period, all related to people deep frying their turkeys. 3 people burnt up parts of their back yard, and one blew up his kitchen, and everyone else either hurt themselves or threw so much smoke out in some way that the department got called to visit. I've seen him come back from wildfires less tired than he was after that shift.

Not a firefighter, but I set my parents bathroom on fire while getting up from the toilet.

My mom used to leave potpourri simmering in a small bowl on the back of the toilet with a candle to heat / stew it just below. As I was getting up I somehow knocked the apparatus off the back of the commode. We had carpet floors in that bathroom and that section of the floor caught pretty quickly. The fire then found a seam in the wallpaper, and ignited the glue fairly easily as well. As the flames rose, it caught the roll of toilet paper on the way up the wall which really accelerated things. All this took < 30 seconds, and I remember being somewhat mesmerized at the path the flames traveled. I also remembered that I had flushed the toilet before realizing what had happened. I somehow thought to grab the toilet bowl brush, shove it into the commode to get it wet, and then beat out the flames.

The aftermath was surprisingly minimal. The small section of carpet was destroyed (but my parents replaced the carpet everywhere a few years later), the wallpaper wiped clean with some hot water and a rag, and thankfully there was only a little permanent smoke damaged on the ceiling which has seemed to fade over time.

Forgetting to close the bottom of your grill then going overboard with the lighter fluid.

Mid-eighties, near beginning of my career. Young lady finished putting flea spray on her pupper, when she noticed a tick embedded in it’s flank.

Ever hear of the tick removal technique in which you blow out a match and touch the hot tip to the tick, thereby causing it to back out of the dog? Yeah. Dog caught on fire.

Little fellow ran under the bed, which also caught fire. Lady grabbed the pup with spray-wet hands, and they too caught on fire.

Long story short, the house was a mess, but both the lady and the dog fortunately survived with moderate burns.

There was also the lady who tried to sanitize her panties in the microwave, but I was off that day.

I was a chef before I was on a volunteer fire department for a bit and this was at a restaurant down the street from my old one. Cooks at this restaurant forgot to plug the drain in the deep fryer. So what happened was they put oil in a fryer, which drained immediately, right before lunch, turned on the empty fryer, and that’s when the coils caught fire. So not only did they spill 5 gallons of oil, burn a fryer, fill a restaurant with smoke and k**l the service day, this was the second time it happened.

Not a firefighter, but a guy in our dorm set the kitchen on fire when he tried to make a grilled cheese by assembling the sandwich then jamming the whole thing into a toaster and passing out.

Decided to use an angle grinder (illegally) on a very high fire danger day, set the grass alight and burned down 12 houses.

"The grass just burned so quickly"

No s**t you f*****t, why do you think we make grinding illegal on those days.


Honorable mentions go to the military for doing something similar with explosives because "we are on defence property so you cant tell us what to do"

Set fire to defence land, fire kept going, killing 2, destroying 500 houses and $94 million.