Tuesday, May 24, 2005

Wow...Talk About Lucky....

I ran into my friend Lisa the other day, and did she have a scary story to tell me. Her and her husband Dean decided last weekend to go boating. So they're driving along in their truck, when all of a sudden Lisa tells Dean that she smells smoke. Well, neither of them smoke, so it's obviously coming from outside. Lisa looks out the back window and realizes that it's the boat that's smoking. Not only is it smoking....there's a full blown fire. So they pull over. Lisa is frantically trying to flag someone down while Dean is trying to rip the boat liner off without getting burnt. Finally a couple pulls over...and luckily they have a fire extinguisher in their camper. They got the fire out fairly quickly, and they were okay...except for being rather shaken, and downright confused about what the hell just happened.

Something was looking out for Lisa and Dean that day for sure. Not only did they have a gerry can full of gas in the back of the truck....the fire was located right above the boat's gas tank. That boat liner saved their lives, in all likelihood. If it hadn't have been there....BOOM! Blown to smithereens on the highway!
You know what caused the fire? A cigarette. That's right...a cigarette caused a fire in a boat belonging to non-smokers. The cops figure that someone in a passing vehicle flicked a butt out their window and it landed on the boat liner.

That freaks me out. How many times did I flick a butt out the window on a road trip? Too many times to count. I never even considered that it could set someone else's vehicle on fire. I worried more about the forests. I used my ashtray on road trips in the summer, when danger of forest fires is highest, but the rest of the time I flicked 'em out the window. See, junkies don't think of how their smoking affects others. This situation just goes to prove that point. How many of us ever considered that the butt we just flicked could destroy some stranger's boat...and if not for a piece of vinyl, come close to killing them?

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