I noticed the other day that the Laws of Nature were suspended in Baltimore for a while.  How long, I don’t know.  The headline and lead paragraph of a Baltimore Sun newspaper article got my attention:

A man was taken to Northwest Hospital Center this afternoon for treatment of injuries after his cigarette ignited an oxygen tank in his Owings Mills condominium, Baltimore County fire officials said.

Now I really doubt that a “fire official” would claim that a heavy steel, compressed gas bottle filled with a non-flammable gas would catch fire from anything, let alone a cigarette.  But it has been my observation that plenty of newspaper reporters believe that oxygen is flammable and take the easy way out when it comes to reporting a fire.

I first noticed this lazy way of uninformed reporting 12 years ago when on May 11, 1996, the ValuJet airliner crashed into the Florida Everglades.  The investigation of the crash revealed that the plane had an onboard fire that was started when an oxygen generator that was being shipped was accidentally activated.

Oxygen generators do not contain oxygen.  They are composed of certain chemical compounds which, when combined, initiate a catalytic reaction that releases high amounts of oxygen.  The catalytic reaction also generates extremely high amounts of heat and in the ValuJet case, this exothermic discharge caught nearby materials on fire.

For the first couple of weeks, the newsfolk reported it accurately, referring to them as “oxygen generators.”  But then the less-experienced reporters-in-training assigned to the follow-up stories started calling them “oxygen cannisters.”  From that time on, that’s how they’ve been  described and now we have a whole new generation of undereducated journalists who genuinely think that oxygen is flammable.

Another case in point:  Back in January a fire occurred in an infant incubator at a Minnesota hospital.  The hospital (hospital people know their chemistry) press release said in part:

For reasons unknown at this time, something within the oxygen-enriched environment of the bassinet ignited. Nursing staff were with the baby at the time, and the flame was put out immediately. 

It can’t be any plainer than that, yet an Assoc. Press scribe led the story by (you guessed it) saying that the oxygen  caught fire.  These are not isolated cases.  Hardly a month goes by without a story that is essentially fabricated by the writer telling us that oxygen has ignited someplace or another.  This suspension of the laws of physics sometimes takes place in Canada, too.  The Calgary Sun practices it.  It never occurs to any of these people that since air is about 20% oxygen, then why doesn’t the whole world go up in flames everytime somebody strikes a match?

One of the most laughable instances took place on a television news report during the haphazard evacuation effort during Hurricane Katrina.  You might recall the case of the bus carrying nursing home residents that caught fire and there was some speculation that their oxygen tanks might have contributed to the destruction of the bus.

One of CNN’s leading blowhards went on worldwide broadcast lamenting that something needs to be done about allowing buses to carry “all of that dangerous oxygen!”  And I’m thinking to myself, “You talking about that same stuff that your body demands that you suck into your lungs regularly or else you’ll die?”

It’s only two months until Firehouse Expo opens in Baltimore.  Let’s hope that their Dangerous Oxygen Alert has been lifted by then.

Ok, let’s get this equipment checked out.  And the O2 tanks, too.  I’ll go start the coffee.

Trackback This Post | Subscribe to the comments through RSS Feed