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These Firefighters Are Having Too Much Fun Starting Deep-Fried Turkey Fires

It's all in the name of public safety.

By now it's a well-known fact: deep frying a turkey mitigates that dryness that plagues Thanksgiving's main course, but also exposes you, your home, your pets, and all of your loved ones to the risk of intense grease fire explosions that only get worse when you instinctively throw water on them.

But—with all due respect to Canada—this is an American holiday, dammit. We'll burn down whatever we have to just for the possibility of later enjoying deep-fried anything, and so, annually, we do.

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According to the US Fire Administr​ation, deep-fried failures contribute to nearly 4,300 fires that happen each year on Thanksgiving, and cause around $27 million in property damage and 15 deaths.

Here's some data from Google Trends around "deep-frying a turkey."

In one country.

Exactly once a year…

Given the irresistible pull of deep frying, the best that firefighters, the people in charge of putting out America's fires, can do is: 1) reiterate the very simple precautions that mitigate the risk and 2) demonstrate just how wrong it can go.

Now, there's not really any reason for this latter one. YouTub​e has quite a few turkey frying disasters for those who learn best by counterexample.

It's a repetitive genre, but one that's always satisfying. Someone—typically a younger white man—holds an uncooked turkey over a big giant pot of roiling oil in the driveway or on the patio. As he lowers it into the oil, someone warns him that he's about to start a fire, he assures them that he isn't, and then does. Then there's an explosion, a fumbling response, and lots of blame, followed by, if you're lucky, some laughter.

But fire departments, thanks to an intimate understanding of fire, safety equipment, and no desire to cook the turkey properly at all, do manage to produce the flashiest explosions and largest Butterball fireballs. Local television stations will often send a crew because it sounds like it will make good TV, and scaremongering is what they do best.

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The resulting videos are sort of one-part cautionary tale and one part Fahrenheit 451, with firefighters deliberately setting fires. Often they're just filmed, scarcely attended live events—it looks like three people were on hand to witness the demonstration in Alaska. Often the firefighter does that really badass move of turning ​away and not watching the explosion.

By far, the genre's Citizen Kane is this example from Cobb County, Georgia. Unlike filmed live demonstrations, the fireman talks right to you, the video viewer, and tells you that now "your fryer is ruined and maybe you set your house on fire." It's also full of mystery, like all great art: why does he have a New England accent if he lives in Georgia? Why are ketchup and mustard the only condiments on his picnic table where he is supposed to be having Thanksgiving dinner?

Accidental fires come down to two problems, it seems: Frying a still-frozen turkey causes all that water to turn to steam, which goes to escape and makes the oil to splash everywhere, especially down onto the flame. The other issue is that people just have too much oil in the pot because, even though Archimedes died over 2,000 years ago, displacement can be hard to account for.

So from all the way up in Ala​ska to all the w​ay down in Florida, properly attired firefighters desire ever-higher turkey fryer fires to inspire home-buyers to practice the safety that the practice requires. While their commitment is something to admire, there's no telling when the trend will be retired—though if history is any indication, probably in early December.