"There was a thunderstorm with lots of lighting. Our doorbell camera caught our neighbor's house getting directly struck by lightning. It started a small fire which was put out quickly. No-one was harmed. When the lightning strike happened it made our garage door open and also the garage door of a neighbor to the west of the struck house. Fire crews and police responded extremely quickly." from its description.

@Payback

Yeah, like RFlagg said, people are communicating him through the text-to-voice thing. In the beginning, they're trying to help him use the lighter by giving him pointers. Once the fire starts, they warn him that another fire has erupted behind him and later on beg for him to call 119 (Japan's emergency line).

I hate to say it, but I was laughing my ass off the whole time. The sheer absurdity of this cute anime-style voice calmly telling him to turn around or dial 119 as the flames continue to grow around him just forced me to laugh out loud.

Kotaku has an article about the incident which includes a Japanese newspaper clipping that says he burned out the 2nd floor of the house and he, his mom, and dad all sustained mild burns trying to put out the fire.

EDIT: Forgot to mention, the Japanese newspaper clipping Kotaku provides specifically mentions the 40 year old son was playing with an oil lighter and dropped it in the trash by accident, which is exactly what we see in the video.

Maybe you're right, but to me that didn't sound like jubilation or delight. It sounded like awe and adrenaline mixed into shock. I even took their decision to "go down" at the end as a hint that they may have been going to try to *help* anyone that was caught closer to the blast(s).


I don't mean this to be a "cool story bro" or "internet tough guy" thing, but: About a year ago there was a house fire (pretty roaring fire, but limited to 1 room) across the street from me. Nobody was home, but I didn't know that at the time. When I saw it, verbally my brain went to mush -- I was just saying "oh shit" about like these guys, over and over. But, the adrenaline and thinking that someone might be stuck in the house whipped me into action. I ended up putting out a good chunk of the fire with hose and buckets before the fire department got there about 15 mins later, and the firemen later said that it may well have spread out of control if I hadn't gotten a partial jump on it.

BUT, in my adrenaline fueled shock, I had forgotten to put on shoes, and had cut up my bare feet a bit by running around on glass that the fire had broken out of a window. Plus, I had rather stupidly been pumping in water via hose and bucket, while standing in a puddle, next to a house that still had mains power going into it...

After the event, my wife specifically said that I had sounded "weird" and not like myself, and hadn't really been particularly coherent in verbalizing what I was planning to do. Anyway, due to the shock and surprise, I'm ready to give these dudes the benefit of the doubt with regards to their weird and potentially "inappropriate" sounding voices and statements.

2 Cats Escaping House Fires has been added as a related post - related requested by chingalera on that post.

So now I've read some more comments here and also on youtube on the video.
I stand by what I said in the second comment (also: only one video on the account, no info on the aftermath in the description, weird cut off moment of the video, candles on even though there is sunlight on the wall).

Having said all that, it is a puzzle, and I am not an authority on either fake videos or house fires. I mean, I was pointing out that I thought it was an *incredibly* good fake, so then it is not easy to detect it is fake (see e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDWCbYevSbI for a very bad fake incl. analysis).

Your video, Russian Method Of Extinguishing A House Fire., has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

This achievement has earned you your "Pop Star" Level 45 Badge!

>> ^ravioli:

see? another reason why plastic bottles are bad!!


Clear bottles filled with clear liquids are the problem here, not the materials.

Good thing that rug is plastic, though. It would probably continue to bubble and melt for hours without ever producing a flame.

Your video, It might be this easy to accidentally start a house fire, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

If we're measuring the success of the bailouts by who got income gains, we're missing the big picture. The point of the bailouts wasn't to redistribute wealth. It wasn't to fix the economy long term. The point of the bailouts was to stop the bleeding, and fix a short term crisis.

I'm disappointed Obama hasn't done more to fix the economy long term. Yes, some wealth redistribution is necessary for the health of the economy. Criticize him for that, I have no problem with it.

Criticizing the bailouts via statistics of income gains broken down by economic class is ridiculous. It's like criticizing using water to put a house fire out because it didn't fix the termite problem. The bailouts were fantastically successful because we're sitting here looking at a excruciatingly slow recovering economy instead of staring at a second Great Depression with no end in sight.

>> ^Duckman33:

>> ^bcglorf:
I'm not sure they even needed 5 minutes, the last 5 seconds seemed to sum up the 'conspiracy' theories quite nicely.
"Ignorance is strength."
If the real world is complicated and difficult to understand, don't take the time to understand it. Embrace that ignorance as a strength and accept a conspiracy theory that draws it's strength from ignorance.

Or ignorantly believe everything you are told even when faced with all these discrepancies in the "official story". See it can go both ways.


And yet if you bother to dig deeper the evidence is clear. The ignorant masses like the clown narrating this video just don't care to do the leg work they say we should all be doing.

Example: Ahmad Shah Massoud was a leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, and he spent the year prior to the Sept. 11 attacks warning western leaders of pending Al Qaeda attack, larger than anything they'd done before. He died from an Al-Qaeda funded assassination on Sept. 10, the day before the attacks on the towers. Incidentally, he was one of the top picks for anyone wanting to unite Afghanistan around against the Taliban too.

Better example: Office fires can't get burn hot enough (1000F) to weaken steel... Oh, but studying further it turns out they actually can, even ordinary house fires exceed 1000F within 10 minutes.

Another Example: Greg Mortenson, a strong opponent of the war in Afghanistan who's basically dedicated his life to building schools for the people living in Pakistan's tribal regions. He was in Pakistan's tribal region when the attacks happened. When word reached the locals, the reaction was immediate and the conviction shocked him. It was universally agreed that it was obvious that it was the work of Islamic extremists from Afghanistan's tribal areas. Essentially to the effect of, "well I'll be, he finally went and actually did it". Their follow-up reaction is important to understand as well. The understanding that a war would follow in Afghanistan, and most importantly, apprehension at wondering which side nuclear armed Pakistan would choose in the conflict. They knew and understand their own country's loyalties better than anyone over in America, and even they weren't sure if a war came whether Pakistan would side with or against the terrorists responsible for the original attacks.

>> ^marinara:

Let's say WT7 had 20 columns holding up 47 floors (that's big). So these big ass columns get pushed around by by the "flooring under heat expansion" and then the other 20 ginormous columns fail instantly, and the whole thing goes down.
If one column can bring down WT7, it wasn't a skyscraper, it was a deathtrap.


One column?

Do you really believe that the professionals at NIST are suggesting that in WTC7 one column was compromised to the point of failure by the fire, but the other 19 were in pristine normal condition?

Right, anything to hang on to your internal belief system.

The body of professionals across the globe are convinced that the devastation of the lower floors of WTC7 and resulting fires were easily enough to cause the collapse. This was so evident that emergency workers were ordered to abandon the burning building in advance, and news crews were reporting about it's probable collapse before it went down.

Your 'theories' are stupid.

Please, keep parroting things like how house fires can't reach 1000 degrees, it helps people see how stupid your ideas are more quickly. Early steel makers regularly made do with wood fires for their forges, and somehow managed to get the steel to melt. A google scholar search will also quickly show that temperatures exceeding 1000 degrees can be reached by house fires within minutes.

House fires can reach pretty insane temperatures, I don't see why its so unbelievable that a building full of paper might also produce these temperatures.

You don't need the same heat as a tanker with 9000 gallons of fuel. That bridge collapsed in minutes, WT7 collapsed after 7 hours of fire...

As for one column failing...well its the straw that breaks the camels back. You'd expect multiple redundancy, but I imagine the trouble with building huge skyscrapers is the more load bearing structure you put in the more weight the structure beneath that has to hold. It doesn't really surprise me that it wouldn't take many things going wrong for gravity to have its way.

As for the fact the building went down like a controlled demolition...why is that surprising. If you want to bring down a building cleanly and efficiently with minimum explosives you look for the card that holds the rest of the house up. The fire did that job as well as any demo expert, it poked and prodded every single Jenga block in that building, it weakened every support and warped the whole structure and if you end up with just one Atlas of a crossbeam holding more than its fair share of weight and a fire goes through the building testing every single one then ya, its the one holding all the weight thats gonna fail.

Wow theorycraftin is ez.

was the wtc7 fire somehow magically hotter than all the other skyscraper fires that never resulted in a collapse?
Do they perhaps use some kind of special fireproofing that protects steel from fire in skyscrapers? I mean they did claim that the planes blew this fireproofing off the twin towers thus exposing the steel. This didn't happen for wtc7.

Why didn't this building collapse?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH5-DpMObGc

or this one?

http://youtu.be/j4MjsVnasLA

You clearly don't understand structural engineering so I seriously doubt you would have a firm grasp of rocket science.
>> ^Skeeve:

According to the American Institute of Steel Construction, "Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F, and at 1800°F it is probably less than 10 percent." This is in addition to the expansion of the steel due to the heat (which is great enough to crack any concrete it is reinforcing). A 20' beam will expand 1.5 inches at 1000 degrees.
So, even if we assume the fire wasn't even as hot as your average house fire, you now have cracked and broken concrete and steel beams that are warping and bending. And, just like a pop can (or a paperclip, or any thing else really) once something has started to bend, bending it further just gets easier.
This isn't exactly rocket science.
>> ^Fade:
I believe when architects are designing concrete high-rises the requirement is for the structural steel to be able to support 3 to 5 times the maximum load that will ever be applied to it during its lifetime. Thus a 'theoretical' (since we have no way of knowing what temperature was actually in place) 50% weakening in the strength of the steel cannot result in a complete failure of all the support column at exactly the same time.
>> ^Skeeve:
A house fire can reach 1500 degrees in 3 1/2 minutes but an office fire can't reach the 1000 degrees necessary to bring steel to 50% of it's strength? Bullshit.
>> ^marinara:
I really doubt that a failure of a steel beam, which supports the floor (and nothing else), could take down an entire building.
Otherwise the facts in this video are generally correct, but misleading. (because office fires don't burn over 1000 degrees)

According to the American Institute of Steel Construction, "Steel loses about 50 percent of its strength at 1100°F, and at 1800°F it is probably less than 10 percent." This is in addition to the expansion of the steel due to the heat (which is great enough to crack any concrete it is reinforcing). A 20' beam will expand 1.5 inches at 1000 degrees.

So, even if we assume the fire wasn't even as hot as your average house fire, you now have cracked and broken concrete and steel beams that are warping and bending. And, just like a pop can (or a paperclip, or any thing else really) once something has started to bend, bending it further just gets easier.

This isn't exactly rocket science.
>> ^Fade:

I believe when architects are designing concrete high-rises the requirement is for the structural steel to be able to support 3 to 5 times the maximum load that will ever be applied to it during its lifetime. Thus a 'theoretical' (since we have no way of knowing what temperature was actually in place) 50% weakening in the strength of the steel cannot result in a complete failure of all the support column at exactly the same time.
>> ^Skeeve:
A house fire can reach 1500 degrees in 3 1/2 minutes but an office fire can't reach the 1000 degrees necessary to bring steel to 50% of it's strength? Bullshit.
>> ^marinara:
I really doubt that a failure of a steel beam, which supports the floor (and nothing else), could take down an entire building.
Otherwise the facts in this video are generally correct, but misleading. (because office fires don't burn over 1000 degrees)

I believe when architects are designing concrete high-rises the requirement is for the structural steel to be able to support 3 to 5 times the maximum load that will ever be applied to it during its lifetime. Thus a 'theoretical' (since we have no way of knowing what temperature was actually in place) 50% weakening in the strength of the steel cannot result in a complete failure of all the support column at exactly the same time.
>> ^Skeeve:

A house fire can reach 1500 degrees in 3 1/2 minutes but an office fire can't reach the 1000 degrees necessary to bring steel to 50% of it's strength? Bullshit.
>> ^marinara:
I really doubt that a failure of a steel beam, which supports the floor (and nothing else), could take down an entire building.
Otherwise the facts in this video are generally correct, but misleading. (because office fires don't burn over 1000 degrees)