Thanksgiving, as you know, is tomorrow.
And as families get ready for it,
firefighters are staying
on high alert as well.
And that's because the holiday is
peak time for home cooking fires.
ABC's Bridget Biolo joining us live
from a fire station in Sacramento
this morning with how you can keep
your home safe this Thanksgiving.
So Bridget, how do most of these fires start?
Brea and Walt, most of the fires we
see on Thanksgiving, and there are
quite a few of these cooking fires,
they start from deep frying a Turkey and
that going wrong very, very quickly.
Let's recap real quick,
what to do the right way to stay safe.
Let's talk to Captain Wilborn once again.
We're doing some things right here, right?
We're not near a house. What else?
So yeah, we don't have anything above us.
There's no overhead obstructions. There's
no combustibles anywhere near
this operation. We're going
to keep that. Had a safe
clearance of three feet.
We want to have our pets out.
We don't wanna have our kids
out while we're doing this.
We want to make sure that we do have
a safety approved cooking,
cooking kit. Yeah, so
that we and we have the appropriate
amount of oil that is in there.
The Turkey is totally thawed out.
It's ready to go at this point.
So we want to make sure we do it
safely when we lower that Turkey
and we want to do it nice and slow.
We want to allow that oil to
kind of come up but not overfill.
While we're doing that,
make sure your heating source is off also.
That show everyone what often happens,
the mistakes that are made.
He is taking off the lid.
We're going to step out of
the shot and the demonstration
is going to be beginning.
Let us know what's happening right now.
So Chris is gonna start walking up.
He's gonna go ahead and
place that Turkey in the oil.
He's going to do it very quickly.
That's not how you're supposed to do it.
And obviously, obviously,
he's dropping it. We're
gonna do a take two.
We're gonna do a take two. Here we go.
This is also a frozen Turkey,
something you're not supposed to be doing.
It's supposed to be
thawed completely and dry.
Here we go. Take 2,
correct. We're gonna take 2 on this one.
So Chris is just gonna go ahead
and get that nice and lined up,
put it in there, and you can see just
what can happen if that happens.
So it's very violent.
You get a lot of fire.
That oil is cooked at 450 degrees.
It's at its flashpoint.
You get a spillover,
and then all of a sudden now
you've got a lot of fire.
At this point,
you're going to definitely want to have a
91 coming if you have anything overhead.
Back potentially cause that,
that to catch fire,
catch your house on fire,
catch your adjacent home potentially
on fire and you got a lot of problems.
So not only that,
but also the thermal burns that
could potentially come from it.
So ideally when you put the Turkey in,
make sure that heating source
is completely off.
And this appears like a dramatic
demonstration, but this happens
really pretty frequently.
Thousands of these fires happen every year.
You said 57. You responded
to last year on Thanksgiving.
Yeah, correct.
So last Thanksgiving period,
we went on 50. 7 fires,
15 of those being structure fires.
And a lot of those fires are
just due to carelessness.
They just people get in a in a
complacent mentality where they don't
have a plan if things were to go wrong,
they're leaving their cooking unattended.
You know, you have stuff cooking
on stove tops that potentially
fall off and cause burns.
Just a number of things that
can happen in the kitchen.
And obviously with Thanksgiving season,
that is the number one time we're
where families come together.
You're maybe using your second
oven where you normally would
just normally use your.
You're one oven and then potentially you're
going to want to have that oven clean.
So you put it in maybe a self
heating when you have it clean
that oven the entire year.
So you got problems coming from that,
just a whole array of different problems
that you could potentially have.
So it's important to keep safety top of mind.
Just really amazing how fast
that fire can ignite, how,
how high the flames shoot up.
So very important to consider as
you are cooking this Thanksgiving,
we're going to send it back to
you in Studio Brea and Walt. Wow,
I tell you what I've seen.
Some aggressive Turkey dunking before
but on the on the second try it got in.
Hey I don't want that thing to go to waste.
It looks it looks like it's done it
hit the ground so maybe we skip it.
But it does show you how big the
flames could be and you're not
at a fire station when you do
it. So that's true.
Be careful and and lowering a
frozen Turkey in is going to
get you that blow up result
whether you slam it in or not.
It's going to do that.
So be careful tomorrow.
So if you want more information on
holiday safety whether that's travel or.
Cooking you can add to our
website thatsabc10.com.