Weird Fire Facts

Hopefully you had a chance to read the recent blog post about house fires and being prepared for making an insurance claim, with emphasis on creating a catalogue of your home's contents. The other post was about some of the historic devastating fires that have occurred, including out of control forest fires, with the thought on that being that sometimes no matter how careful you are, events do happen that are out of your control. Of course, that's why you have insurance, right?
While researching some of those fire facts, i came across a whole slew of weird news items and trivia about fire, so check out some of these strange items.

No-one can prove who invented the fire Hydrant because the patent was destroyed....in a fire!!

A supermarket fire in Paraguay killed 300 people because the owners shut the doors to prevent people from leaving without paying.

The Eternal Fire is a natural gas vent in Iraq that has been burning for over 4000 years, as mentioned historically by Herodotus, Plutarch, and in the Book of Daniel in the Old Testament.

Due to the abundance of low hanging overhead power lines, the San Francisco Fire Department uses only handmade wooden ladders made by on-staff master ladder builders.

The plant Dictamnus Albus is a small flowering bush which secretes an oily flammable substance that can ignite and burn without damaging the plant itself.

Salamanders are often associated with fire in mythology because they tend to find shelter in rotting logs. When these logs would be used as firewood, the escaping salamanders would “magically” appear from the flames.