Fire Safety Rules

Your parents always said “Don’t play with fire.” But you’re about to go out and do it anyway. The least you can do, so as not to give your parents a heart attack (or give them the tragedy of outliving their offspring) is to play with fire safely.

It’s not an oxymoron. By taking just a few basic precautions — by playing with fire safely — you can ensure that, when something goes wrong, the consequences can be managed, and any damage easily contained.

And you’ll note that the word was “when” something goes wrong, not “if”. If you play with fire long enough, you will eventually get burned. Generally when you least expect it. Good fire safety helps make sure that, when you get burned, you don’t get burned too badly.

Here are the basic rules for playing — and dancing — with fire while keeping safety as high as possible. There’s a little risk in everything we do, and that risk is part of what gives firedancing its spice and its thrill. But there’s no need to go crazy. Kai says:

“I don’t care how well you can spin your poi or staff, or how far you can blow a fire blast. If you haven’t done fire safety for other performers, at least once or twice, then you’re not a complete, full-fledged fire artist. You’re close, but not quite there. And if you don’t know basic fire safety — and follow it — then you’re not a fire performer at all; you’re just a dangerous pyromaniac who’s a menace to yourself and everyone around you.”

Never Burn Without a Fire Safety: Your last hundred burns have gone flawlessly? Great! You think that means you can do without a safety? Don’t go there. It takes only one brief screw-up to leave you with a flaming poi tangled around your forearm. It takes only a brief graze of fire across your head to light your hair on fire. A good fire safety can convert a potential third-degree burn into nothing but minor embarrassment and a quickened pulse rate. Your fire safety should be sober, alert, and have at least a damp towel at the ready. (A fire extinguisher is a nice addition, if it’s not dry chem.) The towel should be damp, but not dripping, and it should be nice and large — think bathroom or even beach towel here. Or you can use Duvetyn cloth, which you should not soak with water. (That will wash out the fire-retardant treatment.)

Know Your Fuels: Know what kinds of fuels you’re using. Know what their characteristics are. Know how to handle them. Make sure all fuels are always clearly labeled, so there can’t be any confusion. Knowing what the heck you’re setting on fire is part of being a real fire artist.

Treat Your Fuels With Respect: Even white gas isn’t actually as volatile or as dangerous as fire dancers generally act like it is. But we in Mythic Fire try to treat even kerosene as if it were gasoline. Why? Because it builds up an automatic habit of safety. No matter what fuel we’re using, we keep the smokers at least ten and preferably fifteen feet (three to five meters) away from it. (And this is sometimes difficult, since half our troupe smokes!) When we first un-cap a fuel container for the night, we announce it: “People! We have open fuel — there is now [fuel name] in this dish here.” (Again, this is partly because we know folks will be smoking...) In every way possible, we try to insure that we treat our fuels with caution, so that even if we slip or get tired, the habits we’ve built up will see us through. Most other experienced firedancers know that our fuels aren’t that dangerous — but we all also know that it’s safer to overestimate the danger than underestimate it. When you get lax and careless, that’s when things go wrong.

Cap Fuel Containers When Not in Use: You never know when some audience member will decide to stroll up and say hi — with a lit cigarette in hand. Even when it’s just you and a few other fire folks, you never know when someone will accidentally knock something over — it’s probably dark, if you’re playing with fire, and everyone’s likely to have trails on their retinas from watching the bright flickery stuff. If your fuel containers are capped, it doesn’t matter if someone kicks one over. And even when it’s just you and a few other fire folks, you’re going to attract an audience. Unless you’re out in the wilderness somewhere — someplace where there are no people — folks will be walking up to you, just to see what you’re doing. You don’t know how flammable, how intelligent, or how clumsy they are. Keep the fuel capped.

Guard Your Fuel Dump: Sometimes you just can’t keep the fuel all capped. You’ve got a dozen spinners constantly soaking and re-lighting, for example — opening, closing and re-capping a fuel container each time would be a crazy nightmare. It just makes more sense to have a single open fuel dump, where everyone can go to refuel. Fine. But have someone guarding it. Have at least one person who is specifically designated to make sure nobody approaches that fuel dump with any kind of fire on them — not even a cigarette ember. Don’t split up the responsibility between multiple people at the same time; then one person might think another will handle it. (Rotate the responsibility, by all means — switch off guard duty every three burns or whatever. But don’t split it up among multiple people at the same time as each other.)

Respect the Fire: You can control it — for a time — but never forget that it has a life of its own. It has its own desires and its own spirit, and it will burn you, if you give it even half a chance. (And many firedancers would disagree that we can control it. The Home of Poi site did a poll on this a while back, with more dancers than not voting against the proposition “We can control fire”.) Stay sharp. Watch yourself. Watch the fire.

Don’t Let Anyone Between You and Your Fire Safety: Really, this is a rule for the fire safety, not the performer, as the performer is likely to have more on his or her mind than watching the fire safety. If you’re a fire safety, you don’t have to be the closest person to the performer, but you do need a clear, direct, and unobstructed path between you and the performer — at all times. If something goes wrong, it will go wrong fast; you won’t have the time to dodge around gawking audience members who wandered into the way. If someone gets between you and the performer, don’t be at all shy about telling them to move somewhere else.

Rotate Your Fire Safeties: After ten or fifteen minutes of intensively watching people burn stuff, your eyes are going to have trails all over the retinas. Your eyesight is going to be hindered by that — if something “interesting” happens, it may take you a moment to sort out whether it really happened, or whether it was just the flickering of your overworked optic nerve. That’s not good. When you’ve got a marathon burn session going on, switch off your fire safeties every two or three burns — or every ten to fifteen minutes, if things are chaotic and “burns” aren’t a good measure of time.

Safety-Check Your Equipment: Every time you pull your equipment out of its storage container, give it a good once-over. Check all your quick-links, make sure your wicks aren’t frayed... make sure everything’s solid. When you run into friends saying “Hey, good to see you! We’re about to start burning, wanna join us?”, it’s real easy to get in a hurry and forget your safety check. But the thirty seconds it will take you to do it are not going to hurt you — and finding out too late that some of your equipment wasn’t safe could hurt someone.

Spin Off Excess Fuel Before Lighting: This is an elementary rule of fire spinning, but one that some spinners don’t seem to have learned. After soaking your toys, spin off all the excess fuel before you light up — otherwise you get droplets of flaming fuel flying into the audience. How long is long enough to spin off? Until there’s no more fuel flying off your wicks.

Stay Alert: Keep scanning your area, watching for potential dangers. It’s not enough to simply follow this list of rules like a checklist; you should also be looking out for things that aren’t on this list. Engage your mind, think outside the box, and try to predict anything that could go wrong before it happens.

Wear Safe Clothing: No plastics or synthetics. Vinyl, polyester, PVC, rayon, nylon... they all do bad things when fire hits them. Some will burn themselves; others will melt, leaving you with molten plastic stuck to your skin. Wear leather if you can, or your own bare skin if it’s warm enough, or natural fibers (cotton, silk) if that’s the best you’ve got. Denim is good. Frayed fabrics (including denim) are bad — the frayed bits will catch fire quite easily. Oh, and while you’re at it, forget about feathers or fur. They’re both quite flammable, and they’ll smell bad if they burn, too. Avoid loose clothing and dangly things that can catch on anything.

Never Play With Fire While “Messed Up”!!!: This one should be blindingly obvious. If you’re drunk, you should not be screwing around with fire. Similarly, if you’ve just taken a couple of hits of something psychoactive, or smoked that green stuff... you’re impaired. Put down the matches. But less obvious is the fact that, if you’re tired, overworked, underfed, or underslept, you’re also at higher risk for making mistakes. While Mythic Fire has never tried spinning fire while drunk or otherwise intoxicated, we have had a few mistakes made when we were tired or ill-fed. We recommend being well-rested and well-nourished before spinning fire. When in doubt, try the “smudge test”: take your well-used, soot-stained wicks, and do your routine unlit, for five minutes. If you’re covered with soot smudges at the end of it, you’ll be glad you didn’t do it lit.

Check the Area: If you’re playing in an area that you don’t know, scope it out before lighting anything. Make sure you know exactly where any flammable items are, and be alert for flammables that might not be immediately obvious or expected. (Hay? Sawdust? Curtains? Pile of paint cans? Bathroom full of goths using hairspray?) Ensure that anything flammable is at least ten and preferably fifteen feet from your performance area. (At least three meters, preferably five.) While you’re at it, also check for hazards that aren’t flammable, like slippery or uneven floors, or things hanging from the ceiling that might catch your equipment (light fixtures, improperly fixed cables, “decorative” beams or rafters...). Again, think outside the box here.

Consider Tying Hair Back and/or Wetting It: If you have long hair, consider tying it back in a braid, or even slipping it under your shirt. If you have any hair, consider wetting it down, or covering it under a bandanna. Hair is frighteningly flammable stuff. You can wrap a burning wick onto bare skin, and even hold it there for nearly a second with no problem, but merely grazing your hair for a tenth of a second can be enough to start a continuing blaze. Even though your fire safety can put it out in moments (and you do have an alert fire safety watching you, right?), it will still screw up your hair style and make you look silly until it grows back. Plus burnt hair smells awful. To get rid of the smell, you’ll need to cut off all of the burnt stuff, plus another half to whole inch (say, two centimeters, give or take a bit).

Consider Learning First Aid for Burns: It’s been said many times before, but it bears repeating: if you play with fire long enough, you will eventually get burned. Why not be prepared ahead of time? Have a first aid kit, with ointments, aloe, and so on — and have at least one person on hand who knows how to use it. Preferably, have everyone in your troupe, group, or “informal bunch of pyros” learn about how to use it.

Don’t Get Cocky: After you’ve done a lot of fire, you may start to get complacent. Don’t. Complacency is the mother of carelessness, and carelessness breeds all manner of mistakes. Stay alert, and respect the fire.

Build Up Good Safety Habits: This is more of a meta-rule, a rule about how to implement the other rules. It’s pretty simple, really: Do them always. Do them religiously. Do them until they’re ingrained into your consciousness, into your muscles and bones.