Siua Malota, 79, turned her attention away from her cooking for only a moment, but when she returned it was up in flames. Photo / James Pocock
Siua Malota, 79, turned her attention away from her cooking for only a moment, but when she returned it was up in flames. Photo / James Pocock
A 79-year-old Havelock North woman is considering buying a fire extinguisher in future after miraculously extinguishing a cooking fire poised to engulf her kitchen by using tabletop ingredients.
Siua Malota had briefly turned her attention away from the spring rolls she was cooking in a pot on her stove while home alone.
“I just turned it on and I went to the toilet first. I had been planning with my cousin for something to do and she said she would ring me. Just as I walked out of the toilet I heard the phone and I ran into the back and talked to her, told her where we were going to meet and I put the phone down,” Malota said.
“Just as I came into the kitchen I heard something and I saw the smoke. It was so fast, I couldn’t believe it.”
Thick, black smoke had spread throughout her house of 37 years and hung barely a metre above floor level, forcing Malota to move low to the ground at almost a crawl despite a bad leg.
“I went down low, found my fan, turned it on full and faced it [towards the kitchen],” she said.
“I couldn’t breathe. I felt my lungs, all that smoke inside them.”
She moved the burning pot into the sink, but “didn’t dare” put water into it. At the same time, the range hood mesh filter had begun to melt from the heat and fell down.
She tried to smother the flame by pouring salt and some nearby high-grade flour onto the burning pot and the oven.
Firefighters say it is inadvisable to use flour, which is highly flammable, on fire.
But Malota said she just grabbed the first thing available to her and it somehow worked to suppress the flame in this case.
“I reached out and turned all the switches off. As soon as all the flames had gone out I went and opened up all the windows, ran outside and sat outside.”
She sat outside to catch her breath and cried out “Jesus, help me!” but she didn’t think any of her neighbours heard her alarm ringing or noticed the black smoke pouring out of her window.
“I didn’t even ring the firefighters.”
The fire damage was luckily contained to the stovetop, splash back and range hood. Photo / James Pocock
Jess Nesbit, Fire and Emergency NZ senior adviser for community readiness and recovery, said Fenz recommended calling 111 even if you believed the fire was out, so firefighters could ensure everything was safe.
Nesbit said general advice for a stovetop fire was to use a pot lid or flat oven tray to smother it in the first instance and to turn off the element. People should also never move the pot outside as exposure to the air could cause a flash fire to ignite, injuring whoever is holding it.
Malota was motivated to extinguish the fire because she kept important documents covering her family history in the house.
“I am working on my family history. Genealogy documents from the 1800s originals. Those are my priceless things, I can’t replace those,” Malota said.
The smoke from the fire on a Wednesday afternoon last month had blackened the bathtub at the opposite end of the house and marked her carpet and furniture in the lounge, but the damage itself was limited to the stovetop and range hood.
“I think it was a miracle. I look back and I think ‘Did I do that?’ I am in shock at it myself, but I am ever so grateful. It was something really, really serious, it could have cost my life, I could have had a heart attack, I could have collapsed from the smoke.”
She still had a lingering sense of fear since the fire, but she felt like she would be all right in the long term.
“I have been living on the crockpot, I am too scared to see any flames. I am too scared to even light my fire. It is just that fear and that shock I got.”
She said she would look further into what could be used to put out fires and potentially get a fire extinguisher.
More than one in four house fires start in the kitchen according to Fenz.
James Pocock joined Hawke’s Bay Today in 2021 and writes breaking news and features, with a focus on the environment, local government and post-cyclone issues in the region. He has a keen interest in finding the bigger picture in research and making it more accessible to audiences. He lives in Napier. james.pocock@nzme.co.nz
