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Monday, May 4, 2009

Neighbor Seriously Burned in Sunday Night Fire

A very sad accident took place last night here in Rogers Park. A neighbor, a 64-year-old woman who lives at the Wayne Senior Apts. at 6928 N. Wayne (at Morse) was seriously burned when her nightgown became tangled up in her wheelchair when she was cooking. She stated that she panicked trying to free it, and caught it on fire.

She was found in her kitchen with the gown "melted" to her body, and suffered multiple 3rd-degree burns.

Please, neighbors, be alert to common fire hazards. We all get careless from time to time, and it only takes a couple of seconds to create a tragedy that changes your life forever.

Some of my own tips:

1. Be very careful around a gas stove. An old stove hooked to a corroding old pipeline can "flare up" suddenly, and catch your sleeve on fire. This happened to me once, and fortunately, I was wearing a heavy fabric that had been treated to be flame-resistant. Also, cooking oils and grease can catch fire if overheated. Keep a pan lid handy to snuff out a skillet fire. It goes without saying that you should not have dishtowels, window curtains, a roll of paper towels, or other cloth and paper close to your stove burners. Keep your stove hood or vent clean to prevent grease fires.
2. Synthetic fabrics, such as those most women's nightclothes are made of, catch fire easily and tend to "melt" on your body, causing really vicious burns.
3. Candles- if you like candles, make sure you have the candle in a stable holder. It's suggested you burn the big, solid pillar candles that don't tip over easily. Keep paper, cloth, and other flammable materials away from the candles.
4. Cigarettes and other smoking materials-the majority of house fires are still caused by careless smokers. Make sure you are sitting upright when you smoke. Never, ever smoke while lying down, because you can fall asleep too easily. Also, be careful with butane cigarette lighters, for many of the cheap plastic lighters can leak the butane and cause a fire.
5. If you smell gas, call the gas company, not your landlord. Most older rental buildings have old gas pipelines and old gas stoves that are more prone to this and to leaking gas.
6. Please, please, please don't light firepits and grills on your porch. It's illegal to grill on apartment building landings, with good reason. Be careful about grilling on a balcony, because you are very close to the building.

5 comments:

consultant said...

Laura,

Sorry to hear about your neighbor. Hope she is able to recover soon.

On your other post, A Tragic Scam, I agree.

This is way beyond Obama. As the old line goes, "I have met the enemy, and it is us!"

Today the media reports that in the last 2 or 3 months the stock market has regained everything it lost over the last year. Say what??

We all might as well admit it, even though most don't want to. We have become a gangster nation. It took about 35 years, but we have become a South American style country. The con is on and most of our most esteemed institutions just really want to con you. That's all. We make money the old fashion way, we con you out of it.

Oh, we were legit for a while, after we got those pesky former European powers off our back, but we still had alot of the old world baggage like slavery, taking the Indian's land and the oppression of women. It took us a while to work through that, and no sooner did we think the promise land had arrived, when the white guys said, "oh the hell with it, civil rights, women's rights, it's too much for me. Let's just get the money!"

That's pretty much the track we've been on since Nixon & Co. rode into town.

The American Project is in trouble and it is going to take more than "one man" (how American is that!) to solve this problem.

Last point: consider that for this epic economic Ponzi scheme to have happened, over the years it occurred, required a complete collapse of leadership across many fields in our country.

We are really in bad shape.

The North Coast said...

We've been a Ponzi economy since the late 70s, when we lost our manufacturing and became an essentially unproductive country. That was concurrent with the downslope from the peak of our domestic oil production in 1970.

Commerce and industry are what makes a country wealthy, not swapping paper around. You can usually date a nation's economic decline from the time they move from commerce & industry to financialization.

However, to build the bubble we did, took not only failed leadership but most important, took active government sponsorship. Bankers don't take risks they know they'll have to eat, that simple. And they would never ever have set this up if they knew they would have to be the ones to bear the risks. In other words, they knew that the U.S Treasury would always be the guarantor of the last resort, and would always step in to bail them out. We set a very important precedent with the bailout of Long Term Capital Management, when we let Dr. Greedscam and his cohorts terrorize us into bailing out that hedge fund. We sent the message that we would always step in, and set ourselves up for the mother of bailouts.

And guess what? We're setting ourselves up for another big wave of defaults right now. In its frenzy to get the housing ponzi game going again, the government, through FHA, is writing another huge batch of bad loans to shaky borrowers. About 90% of home loans written right now are FHA loans.

consultant said...

These are 5 books that have helped me understand how we got here:

1) Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. We became so comfortable that most of us are willing to exchange freedom for comfort. Scary.

2) Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death. We are no longer a serious people, in part, because the technology we use for daily discourse bends our meanings in ways that demean us. The means become the ends.

3) Philip Langdon's A Better Place To Live. Among many thoughts, how we construct our living spaces has a huge influence on our sense of community.

4) James H. Kunstler's The Long Emergency. Has many critics, but I consider it a mini classic. Rough times ahead.

5) Christopher Lasch's Culture of Narcissism. A culture in love with itself has no time for anything else.

sarah said...

Dear Laura Louzader,

This is Sarah from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. We are doing a study about civic journalism. Below is a letter about a survey we are doing with owners of civic journalism sites like yours (thenorthcoast DOT blogspot DOT com).The letter explains the purpose and sponsor of the study. Thank you for reading the letter below and I hope to hear from you.

Thanks you,

Sarah Samson
Center for Advanced Social Research
University of Missouri - School of Journalism
135-D Neff Annex
Columbia, MO 65211
(573) 884-6558


May 7, 2009



Dear Website Owner,

You are cordially invited to participate in a telephones survey regarding the motivation, business model, and administration of news content of the website of which you are in charge. Thus, I would be most grateful if I could obtain your telephone number so that I could arrange a time that is convenient to you for your participation.

Your website has been identified as one of the civic journalism sources in the United States. The purpose of our study is to learn your opinions about launching and operating your website as an important source of information about local journalism. This is part of a larger study we are conducting on behalf of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation with the guiding purpose of exploring a community news model at the School of Journalism of the University of Missouri-Columbia.

If you agree to participate in the survey, please email your telephone number to samsons@missouri.edu, and we will set up a time that is convenient for you to be interviewed.

Your participation is very important to the success of the study! Your participation is voluntary, and I can assure you that all the information you will provide will be kept completely confidential so that you cannot be identified. You may stop or refuse the survey at any time when you do not feel comfortable with the questions. The survey only takes less than ten minutes to complete over telephone.

I thank you in advance for your participation! If you have questions about the study, please write to me at flemingk@missouri.edu or call me at (573) 884-6563.

Sincerely,


Kenneth Fleming, Ph.D.
Associate Director of Research
The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute
Director of Center for Advanced Social Research
School of Journalism

The North Coast said...

Dear Consultant,

I regret to report that our neighbor died shortly after being taken to the hospital. It must have been horribly painful, and we're all very sorry for this.

Be careful with your stove and BBQ pit. Oh, yeah, and your clothes iron, too.