Last week, while cooking, I had a scare: the skillet I was cooking in caught fire. By that, I do not mean that the stove caught fire, nor do I mean that the contents of the skillet caught fire. The cast-iron skillet itself caught on fire. It was unnerving to behold, though thankfully free of injury or excessive fire damage.
The fire itself was small and self-contained, existing entirely on the outside wall of the skillet. It was no wall of fire - it looked rather like the flame from a lit candle, spread along a narrow band. The fire was contained, nothing else nearby was close or flammable enough to ignite, so I just stood back and let it burn itself out. I did make sure to turn the stove off and turn on the microwave fan to deal with (some of) the smoke.
Afterwards, the consensus was that greasy particulate had built up on the outside of the skillet and had reached sufficient mass and heat to ignite and sustain a fire, at least temporarily. Nobody got hurt, and nothing really got damaged. And still, I cannot help but reflect on this.
We cannot predict everything, nor can we control everything. There will always be things beyond our control. In a sufficiently complex system, even the slightest of errors can have drastic consequences.
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