Flashover rate...

I read the most fascinating article the other day that has lingered long in my mind.  It is about how your "stuff" very literally can kill you.  Were it not a rather flagrant copyright violation, I would cut and paste the whole thing here.  Hopefully, you will read it for yourself.

It was written by a retired firefighter and starts off with the story of an apartment fire that turned into a six-alarm blaze that was harrowing and hazardous to both firefighters and the residents.


"The men from Station 313 responded by calling in better weapons and more troops: eventually, more than 300 firefighters and twenty-seven fire engines would get involved. The firefighters at the scene switched from the regular 1.5-inch to the 2.5-inch hoses, and started using a ground monitor. This is a device firemen use in extreme situations to create a single stream of water that can dump more than thirty bath-loads of water on a fire every minute. Struggling with the heat in that tunnel of hell, the first responders plugged their hoses into one side of the ground monitor, and started pumping a river of water out the other side onto the fire. At the same time, they sprayed water on themselves to keep their suits from melting, and their skin from burning."


Part of what the author teaches about fires is a phenonomon called flashover:

"Flashover is the moment when so much heat has built up in a confined space that everything in it spontaneously combusts. Flashover is something firefighters think about a lot. Get to a room before flashover, and you may still be able to rescue anyone inside. Arrive after flashover, and you will be removing charred bodies – but only later, because the first thing you’ll be doing is getting out of there. Even in full, heat-resistant firefighting kit, a fire that has flashed over will kill you in less than two seconds."

What contributed to the massive fire was that the fire origin apartment housed a hoarder.  At that point, your mind might just want to tune out the story and the ultimate point of the article.  "I am definitely not a horder," you protest.  But if you keep reading, you'll learn one of the most sobering statistics I have ever heard.  A real statistic.  A practical statistic.


"So, when flashover happens is vitally important. Thirty years ago, it tended to happen around twenty-eight or twenty-nine minutes after a fire had started. Now though – because of the increased amount of stuff in our homes, and because much of it contains plastic and synthetic materials – flashover comes much sooner. The moment from unfortunate spark to murderous explosion is now between three and four minutes."


I very much want my own flashover point to be far, far, far closer to 28 minutes than 3 minutes.  In 28 minutes, you have a great chance to get all of your family out of the home and to get help there in time to save something of the structure, if not all of it.  In 3 minutes, lives are lost.  Forget the home.  In 3 minutes, lives are lost.

In a way, I wonder if the emphasis on ensuring an abundance of coverage of smoke detectors in a home, at least in part, has to do with the fact that we love our stuff.  I wonder if, somewhere along the line, those in charge of fire protection decided that it was simply easier to convince folk to stick a smoke detector up on the wall than to convince them that less stuff is better for them, healthier and safer.

There is a solid section on how hoarders find themselves trapped in the mindset that feeds their disease.  Read it.  Read the article.  For I hoped that, by the end, you would be as open to the author's concluding admonition as was I:

"There is no material difference between you and a clinically diagnosed hoarder, you see. It is a difference of degree. ‘The features of hoarding are on a continuum,’ says Gail Steketee, author, with Randy Frost, of a book about hoarding called Stuff. ‘Hoarding is an extreme version, but in today’s society we all face the same difficult decisions all the time: do I buy this? Do I keep that? And we all save things for the same reasons: because it’s pretty, because it reminds us of something, because it’s useful. But some people go overboard on what they think is pretty or sentimental or useful – and they’re the ones with hoarding issues.’

Think about that continuum for a moment, because I think it explains why one in three households in the U.S. contains a collector, why one in ten Americans rents storage space, and why one in twenty is a hoarder."

I have downsized tremendously.  The resulting visual rest, ease of keeping my house in order, and memory aid for the things I have has been good for me.  But, after reading this article, I want to be as certain as possible that my own personal flashover time is long enough to save Amos and possibly my home were a fire ever to start.

For a while now, I've wanted to whittle down my large collection of children's books.  I mean, no one wants me to teach workshops or seminars anymore.  No one needs me to expound upon the wonders of children's and young adult literature.  Books are meant to be read.

I mentioned to Becky that I would like to find a way to donate them to children so that they could take the books home, to have their own books.  Her very fine brain came up with three agencies for me to contact:  foster care agencies, crisis pregnancy centers, and domestic shelters.  Wow!  Just like that she gave me the seeds of a plan.

So, yesterday, I first dawdled by getting ready for things I have to mail as soon as my next budget cycle arrives.  When I was packing the box for my sister and nephews, I threw in a few books for them.  That got me started.

This was what I managed to cull yesterday.

This is those books and more, the ones from today's culling.  My collection is still rather large, especially since I have all those bookshelves.  However, I am, at the moment, trying to keep only either seminal books or a representative of a type of book.  I know I still have too many counting and color books.  They are just so darned creative.  I am trying to comfort my feelings of culling failure by the knowledge that all the down-sizing I did before was a process that took, essentially, two years.  Down-sizing can be like pealing back the layers of an onion.

In the bags are clothes, shoes, and purses (I am finally letting go of my last three purses that are not in use ... I really just use two, casual and dress).  I would like to fill the second bag as a goal for working on my closets.  They are the last stronghold of "stuff" in my house.

I have little in the attic, but want to go through it all to ensure that nothing that is not needful is hiding up there.  As much as I have cleared out the basement, I still could do a bit more.  It is all organized and put away, but still there is stuff that could be donated, such as all the colored printer paper I have, if only I had someone interested in the office supplies that are worth too much to simply discard.  I've conservatively donated 75% of what I moved here with, but still there is much that remains.

However, as I noted, my closets are not streamlined.  In part they are serving as a dresser for me, for all my hoodies and lounge pants that I need to wear with my almost-always-painful abdomen.  However, I still have clothes that I could donate.  The problem is that my weight has crept up again (and my hair is falling out and I am bleeding and my skin is ashy ... not that the doctor will consider that my thyroid range could bear upping my medication again) and some of the clothes that I would have donated had I read this article a year ago could actually be ... fitting again.  SIGH.

I remain a closet failure.
I am an imperfect person.
Tomorrow is another day.

I will note that very little of my fantasy books are in that pile.  I have considered adding in the Harry Potter books.  I do not reread those all the time, the way I do so many of my other fantasy books.  And the Narnia books.  And the Eragon collection....

Most of my bookcases are legal ones, with glass doors that drop down and cover the shelves.  One is very deep, which housed the majority of my picturebooks.  Those I was rather stern in culling.  So, the top shelf is empty. I wondered if it would be weird to fill that top shelf with my grandmother's wedding quilt and my great-grandmother's wedding quilt.  I would like for them to be in view.

I moved all my Holocaust books up to the space that was emptied in the Informational Books bookcase, which freed up an entire shelf in my middle and young adult books bookcase.  I decided to, for now, put all the antique books that were stacked atop that bookcase on the first shelf and leave just the "trimmings" that were placed around the antique books, five generations of family treasures.  I am not sure if I will keep the antique books there, for they are less visible, but I will say that the visual rest factor of the parlor rose with the clearing/downsizing of stuff off the top of the bookshelf.

With all those books now on the first shelf, one can actually take in those family treasures I chose to keep.  Mine is the BEST birthday present EVER from Rebecca Anne Bettina Matilda Boyles Kulp.  Were I her, I would have kept the book for myself.  It is a handmade book of clippings from magazines and newspapers and such that dates back to at least 1910.  Most fascinating reading!!

I have yet to cull my multicultural books collection.  Nor have I gone through what's left of the Christian fiction I have.  Some is Christian Fiction fantasy, little known to most folk, that I thought I might pass on to someone I know.  Mostly, though, I stopped working because I am exhausted.

The work, however, helped keep my mind off of tomorrow.  I called on Monday to see if I could set up another appointment before my GP leaves even though I am seeing her tomorrow.  There were none available in the next five weeks.  I am still extremely despairing about finding a doctor and having access to prescriptions for the medications I am taking, especially those which are off-label use.

SIGH.

My sister's reward for the 2015 Great Inbox Clear Out arrived today.  She paid for a replacement lettuce spike that I had somehow lost to my Tupperware lettuce keeper.

My original was clear, but I am "making do" with the GREEN one I found, especially since it was the most economical of the many Tupperware lettuce spikes on there.  I've been without mine for years, but I cannot figure out how it got lost, unless it was in one of my many, many, many moves.

It was nice that she funded the restoration of my lettuce keeper.

Amos and I are now on the couch, resting.  One of us is snoring whilst the other of us is considering what other "stuff" that I might downsize.