Killer Cooking Fires--Industry and Regulators Ignore Solutions

In the late night of January 6, 2001, almost everyone in Evelyn Shelton’s family was sound asleep. The 83 year old grandmother lived with her daughter, two granddaughters, and seven great-grandchildren. The kids’ ages ranged from an 11 month-old toddler to a nine year-old. They lived together in a ranch-style house an easy walk from the beautiful Indian River Bay in Oak Orchard, Delaware.

The Nanticoke Indians call the area their ancestral home. Tourists on their way to Rehoboth Beach stream through town on Highway 24, a shortcut from Millsboro. However, after this night, Oak Orchard would be known for a tragic reason: the location of the deadliest single-family home fire in American history.

Late that night, someone in Evelyn’s home cut up potatoes, filled a frying pan with oil, turned on the electric stove, and waited for the oil to heat. The thought of the crispy fries was tantalizing. But it was so late at night. As she waited for the oil to heat up, she sat down to take a rest. She never woke up. As she slept, the stove burner destroyed the family in an instant.

Four generations were wiped out that night. Eleven people in Shelton’s family died: great-grandmother, grandmother, two mothers, and seven great-grand-children.

They died because the electric stove in their house worked exactly as its manufacturers designed it--as a deadly killer. When the knob was turned to high, its burner glowed bright red hot. The pan absorbed the heat. The oil reached the smoking point. The stove kept heating the pan. The oil ignited. Smoke poured from the pan. The fire spread to the cabinets next to the stove. Smoke billowed throughout the house. It filled every room with poisonous gasses. Without even waking, eleven lives were snuffed out. And the stove’s burner glowed brightly--pouring out death and destruction.

Unattended cooking fires kill, maim, destroy and injure. Every year, year after year, day after day, night after night, American homes are set ablaze by stove fires. In 2011, the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) estimates that, in America alone, there were more than fourteen million (14,000,000) fires caused by stoves igniting the food on their burners. They estimate that there are another 140 million (140,000,000) near-miss events that cause damages, but no fire.

The property damage from this massive number of stove-caused fires is over one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000). The Shelton family is just one blip in the on-going slaughter of American families, and destruction of American property caused by the most common appliance--the kitchen stove. More than five thousand Americans die or are injured in fires caused by stoves working as designed.

I patented a simple, safe, cheap and effective solution to unattended cooking fires in 1997:

But, you’re probably thinking, the government will take action to stop this on-going fire-storm sweeping our nation!

If that’s what you’re thinking, you’d be wrong.

In effect, what the various Federal government agencies have done, for the last 20 years, is to help the appliance manufacturers to pretend that they’re doing something, while suppressing any actual solutions.

Since 1996, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), working with the powerful Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM), refused to require stove manufacturers to offer Americans a simple, cheap and easy-to-use solution that would stop 99% of unattended cooking fires. In that time, another 4.2 billion fires flared up on American stoves, maiming and killing 180,000 Americans, and causing more than $30 billion of property damage.

Government agencies (CPSC and National Institute of Standards and Technology--NIST) carried out research projects, starting in 1996, to find ways to stop unattended cooking fires. The researchers, closely monitored by AHAM industry lobbyists, focused on high-tech, expensive solutions. They ignored the obvious, easy, cheap solution. The CPSC engineers said they would not consider solutions that “required users to change their behavior.”

Their final findings? There is no possible way to stop unattended cooking fires.

The appliance industry’s technical group led a session on Cooktop Safety at the 2002 International Appliance Technical Conference (IATC). The results? Again, they decided there was no possible way to prevent unattended cooking fires. At least two cheap, effective, user-friendly solutions were presented at this conference. But the industry-outsiders who presented the solutions were ignored and ostracized.

AHAM sponsored a year of “Recipe for Safer Cooking” events, in cooperation with the National Association of State Fire Marshalls (NASFM). They studied the problem, and concluded that their appliances started fires due to “Careless Cooking.”

The appliance manufacturers and the fire safety organizations receiving AHAM financial support concluded the year of fake concern with the announcement that cooks must pay attention to their cooking.

The AHAM website suggested a solution to the unattended cooking fire problem--”When you leave the kitchen while the stove is on, carry a wooden spoon with you, to remind yourself the burner is on.” Presumably, this fake safety campaign was planned in conjunction with the government safety agencies who had cooperated with the manufacturers’ long-term efforts to sabotage actual solutions to the problem.

The “carry a wooden spoon” solution could be an emblem for the idiocy and hypocrisy of the government/industry cover-up of the real solutions available for this deadly problem.

Carolyn Meiers, the head of the CPSC special committee tasked to find solutions to the annual toll of millions of fires told me, on Sept. 4, 1996, that “Users cannot be expected to change their behavior.” With the AHAM representative, Wayne Morris, sitting at the same table. Wearing a sly smirk, Morris told me that any solution must be “passive,” and that manufacturers cannot be expected to “educate consumers.”

Imagine the auto industry “studying” the problem of deaths and injuries caused by auto accidents. And imagine the outrage if their study concluded that people died driving because they were careless--and because of that there was no possible solution to protect their customers from death and maiming by the cars they sold.

We would not have seat belts, air bags, or other safety devices. These devices are now required by law to be installed in every car sold in America. Even though most auto accidents are caused by “careless driving.”