Cooking is the leading cause of home fires in the United States, and Thanksgiving is the single worst day of the year for them, with Christmas Eve and Christmas Day close behind. The pattern is the same every year: more burners running at once, a bigger crowd in the kitchen, and attention pulled in several directions. Most of these fires are small and are out within a minute. What happens in the hour after that decides whether the kitchen needs a cleaning or a rebuild.
Prevention: the holiday version
The everyday rules still apply, but the holidays break them in specific ways.
- Stay in the kitchen when anything is frying, boiling or broiling. Unattended cooking is the top factor in cooking fires. If you have to leave, turn the burner off, even for a minute.
- Keep a lid that fits each pan within reach. A grease fire is put out by cutting off its air: slide the lid on, turn off the burner, and leave the lid in place until the pan is cool. Never carry a burning pan, and never use water on burning oil.
- Clear the stovetop. Towels, packaging, oven mitts, the wooden spoon rest, the box the pie came in: anything within a foot of a burner is fuel. On holidays the counter fills up; the strip around the range should not.
- Turkey fryers belong outdoors, on a level surface, away from the house, with a thawed and dry bird. Ice in a partially frozen turkey turns to steam on contact with hot oil and throws the oil out of the pot. Use the oil-level test with water first, then dry the pot.
- Check the oven before you preheat. Stored pans and the broiler drawer are where forgotten items ignite.
- Know where the extinguisher is and that it is charged. A kitchen extinguisher should be rated for Class K or at least Class B, mounted away from the stove so you can reach it without passing through the fire.
- Keep children and pets three feet back from the range. A pulled pot handle is a scald first and a fire second.
When a fire starts
- Lid on, burner off, for a pan fire. Leave the lid.
- For an oven fire, keep the door closed and turn the oven off. The fire usually starves.
- If it is not out in seconds, or it has left the pan, get everyone out and call 911 from outside. Close the kitchen door behind you if you can do it safely; it slows the spread of smoke.
- Use an extinguisher only on a small fire, from a position with a clear way out behind you.
A fire you cannot put out with a lid or one short extinguisher burst is the fire department’s job.
The first hour after it is out
This is the part most people do not plan for. A kitchen fire that lasted ninety seconds can leave residue in every room, and the residue changes with time.
Ventilate, carefully. Open windows and run the range hood if it still works and the fire was fully extinguished. Do not run the central air; the return pulls smoke through the ductwork and deposits it in every room. Shut the HVAC off at the thermostat.
Do not start cleaning the soot. This is counterintuitive and it matters. Soot from a grease fire is oily and acidic. Wiping it with a household cleaner or a wet rag drives it into painted drywall, grout and cabinet finishes, and it sets. Dry smoke residue on a flat painted wall can usually be lifted with a chemical sponge by a trained technician; the same wall after a wet wipe often has to be repainted or replaced. Leave surfaces alone until they have been assessed.
Protect what the soot has not reached. Close doors to bedrooms. Cover upholstered furniture in the adjoining rooms with clean sheets. Move anything of value out of the kitchen and the rooms that opened onto it, especially electronics, which corrode quickly when acidic residue meets humidity.
Photograph everything before anything moves. The range, the hood, the cabinets above the fire, the ceiling, the adjoining rooms, and the contents. These are the basis of the claim.
Call your insurance carrier, then a restoration contractor. Report the loss the same day. Whether and how it is covered is the carrier’s decision under your policy; what a contractor does is stop the damage from spreading, document the scope and get the kitchen back. If the fire department used water, there is now a water loss layered on the fire loss, and the drying clock has started. See why water damage is part of every fire restoration.
Throw out exposed food. Anything that was open, in a porous container or in the oven and on the range at the time. Canned and sealed goods can be wiped down by the cleaning crew. Smoke contaminates food you cannot see it on.
Check the electrical. Heat above a range can damage the hood wiring and the outlets behind it. If a breaker tripped during the fire, leave it off until the circuit has been looked at.
What the restoration looks like
A kitchen fire loss is assessed in layers: the fire-damaged area itself, the smoke and soot migration through the house, odor, and any water from suppression. The IICRC fire and smoke restoration standard separates these because they are cleaned differently. Grease-fire residue is treated differently from a protein fire, which leaves a nearly invisible film with a strong odor, and from a wood or paper fire, which leaves dry soot. Odor that has been absorbed into cabinet interiors, insulation above the ceiling or the HVAC system does not come out with surface cleaning, and the odor-removal work follows the cleaning, not the other way around. See smoke odor removal and smoke damage versus soot damage.
On a small fire the kitchen may be back in a week. On one that reached the cabinets and the ceiling, the restoration becomes a mitigation and then a rebuild, and that is where the questions about restoring versus upgrading begin; we cover that in a separate post.
Fire & Water Restoration Plus responds to fire and smoke losses across Wylie and the Dallas–Fort Worth area 24 hours a day, including the holidays. If you have had a kitchen fire, call 972-455-8252 for a free consultation before you clean anything.