GUS (Gave Up Smoking) is a community support diary for Kossacks in the midst of quitting smoking. Any supportive comments, suggestions or positive distractions are appreciated. If you are quitting or thinking of quitting, please -- join us! We kindly ask that politics be set aside.
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Smoking is a leading cause of fire injuries, deaths, and property damage, costing billions in loss of property and productivity; this has been the case for many years, and although the rate of accidental death or injury due to smoking-related fires has dropped in recent years (not-so-coincidentally at roughly the same rate as overall smoking rates have declined), smoking remains the leading cause of fire-related deaths in the USA.
There have been a number of large-scale disasters caused by (or allegedly caused by) discarded, still-burning smoking materials. One of the worst fire disasters in US history may have been caused (according to the FBI) by a discarded cigarette - Texas City Disaster of 1947, which killed at least 581 people.
More recent smoking-related fires include the Oxford Circus Fire in 1984 (after which smoking was banned on platforms in underground stations), the far more serious King's Cross London Underground Fire in 1987 which claimed more than 30 lives, the Bradford City Stadium fire which killed 56 people in 1985, and the horrific Mont Blanc Tunnel Fire in 1999.
While these big disasters grab national headlines or the occasional human interest story in a newspaper, magazine, or news broadcast, most of the deaths and injuries that occur each year for this reason are small-scale, quiet, all-too-human tragedies. A single death might rate a column inch or two in a local paper, or a few minutes as the lead story on the local evening news. If entire families or children are involved, you might get the front-page treatment; likewise if you're a celebrity.
It's not just human beings who suffer the devastating effects of a casually-discarded burning cigarette - forests and the animals who live there are at risk, too. And sadly, pets are frequent victims as well. This isn't a recent phenomenon, either - these fires have been making headlines since the turn of the last century (a massive fire in Coney Island, NY in 1911 killed sixty animals, for example).
If you add alcohol to the mix, or the fire takes place in subsidized or elderly housing, or puts the public at risk in some way, there's predicable outrage from the community, despite the substances responsible for the event in question being legally (if imprudently) consumed. People are pretty much willing to look the other way or ignore this ever-present safety hazard until something terrible happens. Then it's all hand-wringing and "won't someone please think of the children!"
There are unwritten rules involved: Don't smoke in bed. It seems like common sense, right? And most of us know that smoking while very sleepy or intoxicated probably isn't the best idea ever, either. What we know, and what we do, however, are sometimes very different things.
In my two-plus decades of smoking, I can honestly say that I never smoked in bed. That lesson, at least, had been drummed into me somewhere. But I cannot say the same for lighting up while very tired...so tired that I was dozing off, so tired I was sleepy enough to wake up and find three inches of ash and uncomfortable heat between the tips of my fingers, this close to dropping that still-burning cigarette onto a rug, a couch, a chair, my own clothes. Thiiis close to putting my life or the lives of my neighbors in jeopardy.
The most vocal critics of smoking bans or putting limitations on smoking often state that the smoker isn't hurting anyone but themselves...the facts regarding accidental death via cigarette-sparked housefires, however, don't support this claim. According to the US Fire Administration (part of FEMA), this is the reality:
One in four people killed in home fires is not the smoker whose cigarette caused the fire.
More than one third were children of the smokers.
Twenty-five percent were neighbors or friends of the smokers.
The best way to avoid these fires, of course, is to quit smoking. Kind of a no-brainer. Easier said than done, though it certainly can be done. If anyone out there is looking for [yet another] reason to quit, this one is a pretty good one. I considered myself a "responsible" smoker back in the day, but when I finally cleaned up the residue of my decades-long nicotine addiction, there were more than a few burn holes and scorch marks scattered around my home. I got lucky. My neighbors got lucky.
We can't always count on being one of the lucky ones.
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