Careless smoker sparked four-alarm fire in Cambridge

I don't understand why anybody under the age of 50 smokes. You grow up learning about lung cancer, emphysemia, and addiction, and still think it's a good idea to try it?

When will the NFPA start educating people about smoking outside on porches. Window boxes usually have a potting mixture which is flammable, mulch in your garden is flammable. It's been one fire after another involving careless disposed of cigarettes.

How can people be so careless! I would think, especially after what just happened not too long ago in Cambridge. Common sense isn't too common these days. So much damage for such a bad habit.

Full disclosure: I live on the same street, a block away from this fire, and my wife and I actually slept through it. I heard the news helicopters hovering above, and wondered what was going on, but decided to sleep in anyway. We heard no sirens.

Also in the full disclosure department, my wife and I have made many friends in the Cambridge Fire Department over the years. While many of them are now retired, some are still active.

After we woke up on Tuesday, and saw the news online about this fire, we walked up the street to where the Fire Department was starting to pack up their hoses, and chatted with some of our friends on CFD who had responded to it. They told us that the fire had started on the back porch, 2nd floor; and it was quite clear from the burn patterns that the porch was indeed the origin point. While we were watching, someone from the Fire Investigation Unit started sifting through the charred floorboards on the deck.

In the driveway below the deck, I saw the debris that had been thrown off the deck earlier: the metal frame of an outdoor deck chair, its plastic or cloth covering burned away; and a small, charred metal bucket that had obviously been next to the chair on the deck.

I thought immediately, why would someone have a small bucket next to their chair? Of course! It was an impromptu ashtray.

I have read in various fire magazines and online sources, that outdoor smoking and careless disposal of butts is now one of the leading causes of structure fires in Massachusetts,

With increasing stigmas being attached to smoking, people are choosing not to smoke indoors, so they go outside to the deck or the back yard. And when they're done, they either toss the butt or use some sort of informal "ashtray" that isn't suited for the purpose. After all, they're outside, what harm could that butt do?

The butt may end up in dry mulch and start smoldering, leading to a fire that isn't discovered until it flares up hours later.

Potted plants are often used as ashtrays, even though they are completely unsuited to that use due to the inherent flammability of dry soil and root material.

In our West Cambridge neighborhood I am aware of at least FIVE fires started by outside smoking over the last 12 or 14 years or so, this one being the fifth. Two of the others were as destructive as this one; one of those did significant damage to three three-deckers. (All three of these disastrous fires were discovered in the early morning, hours after the butt had been tossed.) The other two were limited just to damage to the deck and adjacent walls.

There have been at least two cases in the North Shore where large, relatively new apartment buildings were completely gutted by fires started in adjacent mulch. And there was a law office on Boston's waterfront, Commercial Wharf, gutted when a worker tossed the butt off the deck into the ocean, unaware that a sea breeze blew it back onto a lower deck.

Oh yes, and don't forget the construction worker's butt that ignited the 10-alarm conflagration in East Cambridge last December that incinerated 18 buildings.

The Mass. Fire Marshal's office has tried to educate people about this danger, but the message hasn't gotten through, largely because it hasn't been picked up by the media. To many people, the message sounds so ridiculous that it's just not believable -- even though it's true.

Yes, smoking outdoors is now a major cause of building fires.