Hawaii Man Fights Fire With Soup, Wins

soup

Miso’s versatile qualities make it great for everything from soups to butterscotch, but this fire extinguisher thing is a new development.

On Saturday morning, an electrical short in the laundry room of Joy Gardner’s Hawaii Island home ignited a fire that nearly engulfed the house, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reports.

Thankfully, the fire’s crackling sound woke Reuben Prensky, Gardner’s son who was visiting from Canada. Prensky ran to the kitchen, grabbed whatever was nearest to him — which just so happened to be a pot of miso soup on the stove — and dumped it on the fire. His quick thinking slowed the fire enough so that Prensky could grab a hose and douse it completely.

“Everybody agrees, if that fire had gone on for about 30 more seconds, it would have burned the whole house down,” Prensky’s mother said.

Firefighters noted that had the fire lasted any longer, it had a good chance of hitting the home’s A-frames and spreading beyond control. It didn’t, but the casualties included a “melted sink, a blackened wall, and orange and white cubes of vegetables on the floor.”

Japanese research found that eating three or more bowls of miso every day could reduce women’s risk of developing breast cancer, but dumping it on a fire in her laundry room just may have saved Gardner’s life.