Never mind that, we can all get caught out by a strong gust of wind thumping the tent into a cooker. ALWAYS, ALWAYS keep an eye and hand very close if cooking in a porch.

Here ends the broadcast.

It would be interesting to find out what type of stove they were using. The reason I still won't change to alcohol stoves is that my gas soves do not flare inside a porch when cooking in bad weather but the alcohol ones do.

Glad they are okay.

Jamie @ www.trekkingbritain.com wrote (see)

It would be interesting to find out what type of stove they were using. The reason I still won't change to alcohol stoves is that my gas soves do not flare inside a porch when cooking in bad weather but the alcohol ones do.

It is interesting to note that the recent tent fire reported elsewhere happened because the anonymous owner was using gas, and very probably would have been avoided using meths.

What happened is that he left the tent without noticing that the stove was still alight, though turned right down.  While he was away the wind blew part of his tent against the flame.  Had he been using meths he would not have been able to turn the stove so low that he could climb over it to leave the tent without noticing.

Whatever type of stove, Shirley's advice (above) applies. 

Edited:   to remove the name of the recent victim 'cos he's taken enough stick already, but all those who matter know who you are.

The report says "Two young women were airlifted to hospital after the wind caused flames from the stove they were using to set fire to their tent."

That does not tell us whether the wind blew the flame onto the tent, or the tent onto the flame. 

Any stove used in a porch is dangerous and needs to be watched, a meths stove (which ive been using for 20yrs ) has never flared up any more than the height of a gas burner sat on top of a canister (hight of the flame from the floor) its more the distance from the nylon .

Anyway its all open because there are no facts, they could have quite simply over filled the burner and lit it ,causing a mini volcano .

I asumed as it was DofE then it would be a trangia. Frum I do agree in that instance it was because of the fact he could turn the gas down so low he wouldn't know it was lit, but in summer you often can't tell if meths is lit or not unless its dark and I think if you took 100 cases of these type of fires I reckon I'd bet the rest of my years wages that theres a hell of a lot more using meths than gas that end up burning there tents down.

Totally agree any stove has to be fully watch and overly taken care of, I always do and won't leave it or even do anything until its cooled down and is in pieces again.

Its not about the height of the meths flames its more about distribution, the gas flames are controled due to the burner holes and the limitation in gas being sent through, but with meths they can be extremely wild and uncontrolable flames, plus if you spill meths around there is no getting rid of it by turning it off or blowing it out unless you have a bucket of water close by.

I don't claim to be commenting on the above news event anymore by the way as I don't know the facts at all.

Trevor.

"Not guilty your Honour"

Luckily I/we could laugh about my incident, not so in this case. Sadly