Extinguisher stands were hardly a standard safety option during the all-too-brief career of William McGonagall, the Dundee man commonly known even today as the "Worst Poet In The World." But McGonagall--the poetic chronicler of the Tay Bridge Disaster--would have been the first to applaud the invention, though it surely would have spelled the end of his career.

Setting up a small construction site is a big event for any business. But from the fence to the fire extinguisher trolley, there are any number of hidden expenses and scheduling issues you'll need to deal with when you're setting up a site for a small construction project.

Fireproof doors: a foolproof solution to fire safety issues, right? Not always. As the victims of the 1903 Iroquois Theater Fire learned, sometimes the most state-of-the-art fire safety measures don't do any good in the heat of the moment.

"A more wretched hive of scum and villainy you will never find," said Sir Alec Guiness about the massively urban spaceport in Star Wars. The same could be said of virtually any major city, and if you live in a major city, you've got to be concerned with burglaries. Here are some tools for beating big-city burglars, assuming that you have a good fire escape ladder and some common sense.

If Huck Finn and Jim had thought to carry foam extinguishers with them in their classic flight down the Mississippi, they might well have had an easier time of everything. That's what Disneyland employees learned one morning when a raft on their classic "Tom Sawyer Island" attraction burst into flames.

Are fire safety signs beautiful? Or are they the kinds of things people simply don't notice? Or are they possibly an opportunity for unique creative expression? The work of Leon Reid IV (alias Darius Jones, alias VERBS) raises these questions and more.

The fire brigade, especially in the past decade, has been hailed throughout the world as one of the unambiguously heroic members of a community. Fire fighters work selfishly to put out destructive fires, often running into burning buildings to save innocent lives. But was the history of the fire brigades always quite this romantic?

Mains smoke alarms are now common in modern buildings. In fact, most American building codes now require mains smoke alarms as part of their safety policies. It's a triumph for personal fire safety--and occasionally, as this personal anecdote shows, it's a headache.

Fire fighting, especially in recent times, has gotten a reputation as one of the most romantic and noble professions anyone could commit himself to. And it's by no means a new phenomenon: the romance of battling the flames was central to the success of the 1991 Ron Howard film, Backdraft. But how well does the fakery of fire fighters' lives stand up to the reality?

Can Pixar's latest film, WALL-E, have a fire safety message? Of course it can and kids will take more notice if they see it at the movies