Thursday, January 9, 2014

Negligent smoking

Lincoln Fire Inspector Rick Campos did a nice job yesterday briefing the news media about trends in Lincoln surrounding fires caused by negligent smoking. He had some interesting facts. Smoking materials are one of the most common causes of residential fires (cooking is the other biggie). The most common ignition occurs in refuse containers and bedding materials.

Rick had examples of people snuffing out their smokes in plastic flowerpots, plastic trash containers, and even (duh) a paper bag. We cited a person last week for negligent smoking--a city ordinance that prohibits careless disposal of smoking material. You can expect even more of this in the future, if the evidence warrant such charges.

This all reinforces my belief that the declining number of residential fires is a reflection, in part, of the declining percentage of Americans who smoke. I wonder if those new-fangled e-cigarettes will catch on and even further reduce fire risk among smokers--or, alternatively, will a proliferation of newly-available smoking materials counteract the effect?

5 comments:

Steve said...

Over that last several years, I've noticed an awful lot of people who apparently go out doors to smoke, even at their own homes. Might be they have kids inside, or a spouse who doesn't want the smoke inside. Regardless, the fact that they still smoke, but do it outside, might cut down on house fires as well.

As for the availability of other smoking materials, I don't think we have to worry too much. They usually hang onto to those roaches until their fingers are burning to get every last puff. There's virtually nothing left to start a fire. Of course, they might then go out and use a candle for light to look down the filler pipe of their gas tank to see if they have enough to run to the store for some ding dongs.

Nick Bergin said...

Director,

How should Nebraska and Lincoln deal with the influx of ganja from the state next door? Crack down, ease up, jump on the bandwagon?

Tom Casady said...

Nick,

None of the above. I choose:

d. Wait and watch

Tom Casady said...

Nick,

Also, see final paragraph from this post in 2008. Same rationale.

Anonymous said...

That's a mindful and appropriate approach Tom. With Colorado as our guinea pig, a year from now we'll have the data to see correlative evidence of the social effects of legalized retail cannabis. Positive or Negative. I suspect we will see both. I look forward to your post about it in the future.