a little scare...

We had a little scare just this past sunday night! We were at my mother in law's condo and after dinner, my sweet tooth was calling out for dessert. There was an apple pie in the freezer, so I turned on the oven and put the pie in.
We were all watching the movie King Kong on tv, obvious to what was going on in the kitchen. 20 minutes later, when it was time for the pie to finish warming up, I turned my head and saw the kitchen ceiling filled with black smoke!!!!! I rushed into the kitchen and looked into the oven. I saw the oven burning inside (a little fire has started!) and quickly ducked and opened the oven door. Luckily, the fire was not that big yet, so only a little flame was burning on the heat coil. Lai lai took the fire extinguisher and snuffed the fire out.
All this happened really fast, next thing we know, the smoke detector in our condo kept going off! We were afraid that the whole building will learn about this and have to be evacuated, so we quickly started to fan the smoke away from the detector and opened the balcony door. When the smoke dissapated, and everyone's heartbeat returned to normal, we were left with a condo full of black sut - and I mean EVERYWHERE! We spent the next 3 hours cleaning the kitchen and vaccuuming, but after the intense 3 hours, there were still more surface to clean...
We suspect the fire started because there was some left over grease from previous use on the coil and that burned when we turned on the oven this time.
After this little mishap, I realized there are a few facts we should keep in mind:
- make sure there is a fire extinguisher at home and know how to use it
- when opening a burning oven, duck down low before opening the door because the oxygen can feed the fire creating a burst of flame
- in a grease fire, don't pour water on it. instead, use corn starch. the corn starch will stop the air from feeding into the fire.