Fire fire!

While I was happily sipping my green tea over lunch, a young waitress caught on fire. I didn’t see how exactly, I think she was refilling a meths burner on someone’s table. There was a huge, ceiling high cloud of flames as a combination of her nylon uniform and the large meths bottle went up a treat.

No-one in the growing crowd seemed to know what to do with the poor girl, who had pretty much frozen from the shock.  The flames were smaller now, steadily eating away at her clothes and she was eerily silent. After the initial surprise, I jumped up and went over to try and encourage her onto the floor to help put out the fire. However, she didn’t want to go! And why would she listen to a wildly gesturing foreigner with crazy ideas?

I felt like I could hear the seconds ticking by, dreading the injuries she might be sustaining with every passing moment. Thankfully someone found a broom and began beating the flames out. She was ushered to one side and some colleagues herded her to the sink where they feebly splashed water on her arm and cooed over her somewhat reduced fringe. Very luckily, that appeared to be the extent of the damage. She still hadn’t made a sound.

Feeling like there was very little we could do, given our lack of mandarin, we retired to our tea pot. We were left wondering how on earth a hot pot restaurant, which has stoves on every table, has not a single fire extinguisher or fire blanket? Not even a handy bucket of water or sand? Why is no-one in the whole place trained in first aid, or putting out fires? And why are the waitresses all wearing highly flammable uniforms?

Half an hour or so later, the injured girl re-emerged, got into a taxi and was, I hope, taken to hospital. To my absolute horror, there was a dry, white fluffy towel draped around her burned arm. Writing this now, I feel terrible that I didn’t do more to help her. I could have plunged her arm into the fish tank! That would have been far more effective than little splashes from a tap. I could have taken the fluffy towel, wet it and put it back. But the language barrier is so great and these ideas so foreign. Why would she or her colleagues have allowed me to do any of these things? Should I have tried harder?

We might get fed up with the sometimes over-zealous health and safety laws in England, but the responsibility and duty of care that employers legally have for their employees is literally life-saving.  

Before I left England a friend, who lived in China for a while, advised me to try not to get too emotionally involved in things I might see here, because there’s nothing one can do to change it. Today, for the first time, I remembered his advice.