charlie wrote ... Good fortune in one respect: one piece of CPVC in
the entire
copper and cast iron system, and it was not to far from where the fire started.
It eventually melted and put the fire mostly out before the fire department was
even called.


I had a similar incident with my first car back in the early eighties.
My "friend" got sick of waiting for me to say goodbye to a
girlfriend, and decided to take my car for a joy ride through the leaf
piles in the neighborhood. It was one of those fall days where
everyone has raked their leaves into the street for the city to come
by and suck up with one of those oversized shop-vacs. He discovered
how fun it is to go bouncing off them at 30mph. Later as we were
driving home, you guessed it, flames start shooting out from under the
hood as I'm heading down the main drag. We start arguing over whether
the fire would get worse if I pulled over or if I kept driving. It
was a short argument and I pulled over into a parking lot, opened the
hood, and woooffff, the fire indeed got worse. I ran to a nearby
office building and got the janitor to bring out a bucket of water.
When we got back to the car, the fire was out. It burned through the
radiator hose and put itself out. A few weeks later as I was
attempting to repair the damage in the engine compartment (what would
be a lost cause), I inspected the fuel line to find it had nearly
burned through. Made me wonder if the engineers designed the radiator
hose to burn through quicker.

Joe