I'm a Little Teapot, Scorched and Stout

Despite being specifically designed to withstand high temperatures, a metal stove top kettle can, in fact, catch on fire. This is one of the many valuable and useful lessons that ought to be taught in school, but isn’t.

Recently, I found myself wishing that I had been given this knowledge in a structured academic environment, instead of learning it the hard way in my kitchen. You might think that it is fairly impossible to ignite a metal teapot using only the heat generated from a standard stove top burner, but you would be vastly underestimating Ring Luck.


I don’t recall reading anywhere on the box that said that this sturdy water-boiling kitchen device wouldn’t catch on fire, so I guess it’s partially my own fault. My wife and stepson were away from the house at a Scouting event, and I was watching the girls at home. For some odd reason, I never considered boiling water to be particularly dangerous, so I started a saucepan of water to brew some tea.


I’m not sure entirely what went wrong, but my second mistake was to turn my back for half a second. That’s when all the catastrophes happen around our house. If you don’t believe me, then you should come to my house and stand in any of our children’s tidy bedrooms, then turn your back for half a second and see how fast it erupts into a massive disaster zone. All it takes is for you to turn your back for a brief moment. Catastrophes are amazingly fast.


My first mistake, if you were wondering about the mistake count, was to turn on the wrong burner, on top of which was sitting an empty teapot. I didn’t realize this mistake at the time, when I left the kitchen and went to another room to take care of one of the other hundred chores we always seem to have piling up at our house. The girls were in the living room, adjacent to the kitchen, and I briefly stepped into a bedroom when the fire alarm went off.


Frustrated, I ran out and silenced it, while simultaneously trying to calm my 4-year olds with expressions such as, “It’s ok, it went off by accident, it was just a test, the battery must be going bad, don’t worry,” etc., all while I was wondering what was causing that sudden strange melty smell.


Now, I’ve never mentioned it before, but I am very thankful for the girls’ wonderful day care center. They have done an excellent job for preparing the girls for the constant string of disasters that they are almost certainly going to have to face in the coming years, due to the fact that they are Rings, hence subject to Ring Luck.
So they knew that it was important to remain calm while telling me, “There is a fire in our kitchen.”

“What? How can that be?” I thought as I rushed into the kitchen, only to arrive and see the teapot inexplicably engulfed in flames. Again, I have to give the girls credit for realizing the situation and asking me, calmly, “What do we do? Do we need to run outside?”


I was amazed at how they were handling the situation, considering the normal mass panic that occurs when a Polly Pocket shoe has somehow ended up in the Strawberry Shortcake container. So part of my mind was pretty impressed. The part that wasn’t consumed with panic, of course.


Since I was still confused as to how it was even physically possible for a teapot to be on fire, I wasn’t sure what was actually burning. Therefore I was somewhat afraid to dump water on it. I hadn’t been using any grease that I was aware of, so it probably wasn’t that kind of fire, but metal doesn’t normally spontaneously burst into flames either, so I wasn’t ruling anything out.

The first thing I tried was to smother the flames, just in case. After destroying the dry towel I grabbed, I settled on the old standby of dumping water on it. Which worked, and the total damage only included one ruined towel, if you don’t count the destroyed teapot itself. Or the scorched drip pans. And our air filter wasn’t looking too good after processing all that smoke either. But still, the house was still standing, so I’m counting it a success.

That’s the story of how Hayley saved our house. It turns out that the plastic handle on the teapot is what caught fire. Apparently it’s not a good idea to put an empty pot on a hot burner.



I learned several very important lessons through all this: 1. If you’re child tells you that the house is on fire, it’s a good idea to double check, on the off chance that it’s not an exaggeration; 2. Make sure to only use a wet towel when trying to smother an oven fire; and 3. Our teapot might be a melted husk, and the stove burner might be coated with a thin layer of melted paint and plastic, but at least I can rest comfortably knowing that the smoke alarm in our house works perfectly.

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