Stove Rules

I have a few rules for dealing with the kitchen stove, to make sure that I never set the house on fire, burn my housemates, etc. The rules are as follows:

1. If leaving the house for any reason and for any expected duration, both stove and oven must be turned off. No exceptions.
2. When cooking anything on the stove, I must remain in the kitchen at all times. This applies even if the power is off, as the stove is electric and retains heat for some time.
3. Boiling milk must be watched with especial caution.
4. If baking something in the oven, I must set a timer if I want to leave the kitchen. The oven light should also be turned on as a warning to others that it is hot. Leaving the house is not permitted.
5. The heat on the stove should be set to the minimal level required (generally not more than medium heat). 

I've found that, with these personal rules in place, I've never had anything worse than the pot of spaghetti spilling over and hissing, and since I was always within earshot I could take care of it immediately.

What brought this on? Well, this morning, I found a kettle on the stove, with the heat up. The transparent lid of the kettle had no condensation; suspicious, I lifted the lid to check.

Bone dry.

This is, in fact, how many kitchen fires happen. The presence of water keeps the temperature of the pot at 100 degrees C, since at any higher temperature the water undergoes a change of state to steam, dissipating the latent heat. Once the water is all gone, the pot is able to reach a higher temperature, until some part of it, or even some leftover food residue, reaches its ignition temperature. 

Of course, it might not ignite at all. It might just sit there for hours getting hotter and hotter, until someone decides to touch the handle. Either way, it isn't safe.

I turned off the stove, of course, and warned my housemate as to what happened. She was very apologetic, and explained that she is quite forgetful over such matters. I left it at that.

This afternoon, I went to the kitchen and found the same kettle, steaming away unattended on the stove. There was at least some water inside, but it was only up to an inch in depth and rapidly diminishing. It was quite clear that this was what had happened the first time, only I caught it at an earlier stage.

This isn't the worst I've seen. A few years back, I was living with some different housemates, all boys. Sometimes I'd wake up early in the morning and find a very warm pot on the stove, empty and clearly left there from the previous night, the temperature control turned up to the highest heat level.

Do these people... not have any sense of safety? Have they done this a million times without consequence? Does the prospect of a fiery demise simply not bother them? Does the prospect of massive property damage and killing goodness-knows-how-many-others living in nearby apartments simply not bother them?

There was an article recently on BBC News, about car-manufacturing companies which were confident that they would be able to built a completely accident-proof vehicle someday. When I saw that article - when I had only gotten as far as the title - I laughed.

Nothing will be completely safe so long as irresponsibility exists in this world.