Les Couches Dangereuses
The Freep investigates the safety of student housing, featuring prominently one student whose experience with a house fire caused him to come out in support of the ban on, as one of the subheadings puts it, “dangerous couches.”
My solution would be spray asbestos all over these undergrad houses. Once you solve the problems of the fires, you can move on to the problem of the mesothelioma. I’m sure the brilliant Michigan undergrads (who can’t seem to prevent their couches from spontaneously combusting) can figure out a way to deal with that one.
posted by DrMandrake on December 20th, 2005 at 12:55 pmI would be willing to donate the 1950’s era asbestos tile siding from my house. I am not afraid of my furniture.
posted by stella on December 20th, 2005 at 1:39 pmOnce couches are outlawed, only loafers will have couches.
posted by Dave on December 20th, 2005 at 4:55 pmPorch couches present particular problems when it comes to fires. While a couch burning inside a building will use up the oxygen in a room and extinguish itself, a porch couch has an endless source of oxygen and will continue to burn, Ann Arbor Fire Marshal Ron Heemstra said.
HUH!? A BURNING COUCH INSIDE A HOUSE WILL EXTINGUISH ITSELF!? That’s right folks, start lighting your couches on fire - as long as they’re not on the porch, they will gently and happily cease to burn, leaving all other items unscorched and intact. I think it’s pretty clear what’s going on here - God himself is against couches on porches, thus no couch within the confines of a house will burn for longer than ten seconds max.
Unfortunately, couches on the porch, being constructed of pure sin, will burn infinitely if set on fire - both inside and out for all eternity, and no fireman in the world can stop the conflagration. furthermore, porch couches will burn with a fire that gives off no light, so that the condemned remain burning eternally in darkness.
posted by Real Big on December 20th, 2005 at 5:42 pmAmen and hallelujah! Testify!
posted by FAA on December 20th, 2005 at 6:18 pmUh… Speaking as someone who has intimate knowledge of erm… accidently setting a neighbor’s couch on fire, indoor couches do tend to smother themselves out, and outdoor couches do tend to turn into huge flaming pyres, due to the difference in the amount of oxygen. I’m against banning ‘em, but that doesn’t mean I’m a dumbass…
posted by js on December 20th, 2005 at 9:13 pmit seemed at first glance that it would take a pretty marginal case to prove that indoor couches are less prone to burst into flame than outside ones due to oxygen deprivation - for instance, it would require that the indoor couch be in a small room with no windows, or with all the windows closed. But, I defer to your firsthand knowledge of couch-lighting, js. i am no scientist.
posted by Real Big on December 20th, 2005 at 9:37 pmWhoa, hold on! Let’s not be implying that js is a scientist, when he’s only got an n of 1! He’s got a lot more work to do - I want a randomized sample of at least a few hundred burning samples.
posted by Murph on December 20th, 2005 at 9:39 pmY’know what likes to spontaneously catch on fire?
Faulty wiring from ghetto landlords and the inspections that allow it, amongst other things like illegal basement apartments, to go unnoticed. It’s funny, my experience with friends going through one of those fires made me fall in “that’s not what we should be fucking concentrating on” camp in regards to the couch ban.
But one can’t easily blame that on the kiddies, eh? Correlation doesn’t prove causation, and pretty much every student house has a beat up curbside couch on the porch. But let’s just neglect science and reason, eh?
posted by Jen on December 21st, 2005 at 12:36 amYou grubby students need to be put in your place. To preserve the character of our fair city, it is hereby ordered that all porch couches be replaced with tasteful furniture from a bona fide Ann Arbor purveyor of tasteful furniture like Three Chairs. Ask your parents for the money, you spoiled bastards.
posted by Dave on December 21st, 2005 at 10:04 amBig: The windows don’t have to be closed.
posted by js on December 21st, 2005 at 12:31 pm[Ok, full disclosure: I lived on Mary Court, and somehow a bunch of the houses had gotten those military smoke bomb things that are supposed to put out a huge amount of smoke, except that they don’t really. They do, however, shoot out about a five inch flame, which is hot enough to ignite the smoke. False advertising in fireworks? Who knew? So, anyway, we’re drunk and we thought it would be funny to put a smoke bomb in the house of the uptight sorority girls across the street, since the previous one in the house of our stoner neighbors had been met with mirth by all— that one actually smoked, and it led to them firing off bottle rockets in our house. What can I say? Some students do engage in wildly stupid, chemically enhanced behavior. So, we put it on their windowsill, and the smoke bomb does two things: bursts into flame and propels itself into the house. We, being just bright enough, decide it’s time to leave, and go back to playing video games or whatever. The next morning, the girls show up pounding on our door. They suspected the wrong people, and we were able to piously deny that we had any knowledge of their involvement. It seems what had happened was that the couch had smoldered and burned itself out over the course of several hours, and that was to blame of the acrid, yellow smoke that had poured out of their window downstairs. The couch had burned from the middle, and about half of it was gone. The fire department hosed off the rest, and hauled away the couch, noting that the couch had essentially put itself out. Luckily, the couch was of a quality generally associated with dorms, and while the landlord tried to screw them on many other things, they did not notice that we had simply swapped in a new couch that we found on the street.
And that is why I will never sublet my place to undergrads.
My other data point is from living on Packard when they were doing road construction and seeing a couch lit on fire there, which ended up melting the pavement and burning down to a skeleton of wires. Which was pretty cool, but I just lived down the street from it and had no knowledge of the arsonists.]
Here’s a solution to all that is wrong in Ann Arbor in one fell swoop: you can keep your damn couch on the porch but sometime during the winter when you or your landlord hasn’t shoveled for a week I can drag the couch to the sidewalk, set it on fire, and melt the ice and snow build-up. If this accidentally burns down a house we’ll have instant parking or greenspace available, take your pick. I’ll be down by the co-op drumming for peace solving international problems if you need me.
posted by Thomas Cook on December 21st, 2005 at 1:32 pmI still think couches should start showing up on the northwest corner of the Diag.
posted by A Different Jon on December 21st, 2005 at 2:27 pmnow THAT is a fabulous idea.
A Porch-Couch-Town(tm) protest…who’s volunteering to pass out the leaflets?
posted by OFWinsurgent on December 21st, 2005 at 3:00 pmWell, I did hear the Diag was lacking in sitting spaces… two birds with one stone, eh?
posted by Jen on December 21st, 2005 at 5:03 pmJen - Yep. McGovern issue + porch couches. Could backfire if the anti-couch thugs resort to arson. Perhaps tie in affordable furniture for affordable housing?
OFWi - Thanks! I’m in Chicago, but I can post something on the web.
posted by A Different Jon on December 21st, 2005 at 6:15 pmIt’s funny, they mentioned the basement and attic apartments in the story, but they didn’t focus on those nearly as much as the porch couches. But hey, mustn’t bash the landlords since they work hard to keep those houses in the conditions they are in.
posted by Kozzie on December 21st, 2005 at 9:34 pmIt’s been my experience, living in student ghettos, that couch fires are the result of bored and drunk students pushing a couch onto the street and deliberately lighting it on fire. That happened on my street at least three times in the past year…
posted by Mara on December 30th, 2005 at 4:57 pmMara, do you live on the same block as js?
We can take a few things away from this.
1.) If you are going to burn a couch or fry a turkey, you must do this at a safe distance from your residence and your neighbors’ residence, too.
2.) Barring that, it is safer to fry your turkey or burn your couch indoors. It will use all the oxygen in the room and extinguish itself.
3.) If you yourself need oxygen to respirate, do not remain in the same room as a burning couch or a frying turkey.
4.) (Thesis to be tested) Open windows above burning couches act as chimneys.
posted by A Different Jon on December 31st, 2005 at 4:33 pmHmm, very interesting. I’ve lived in the student ghettoes for almost three years, and I have yet to see drunk kids taking couches onto the streets and burning them. Maybe I’ve been living under a rock . . . .
And this argument about a burning indoor couch putting itself out due to lack of oxygen as opposed to an outdoor porch couch is bordering on rhetorical nonsense unless I see some hard data on the subject. How do fires indoors continue period? If the amount of oxygen inside a house is diminished as compared to outside, does the type of object initially burned even matter? Be it a couch, a chair, a mattress, or even faulty wiring? If there is a difference between the flammability of porch couches and indoor couches, the difference is marginal.
As many have stated before, there is a real reason why porch couches are being attacked. They’re unsightly, PERCEIVED to lower property values, and most importantly, are predominantly a fixture in student housing. This city and its “permanent” residents have a long history of marginalizing and attempting to control the student body. But we shouldn’t bullshit ourselves into believing their dumb arguments.
posted by Jared Goldberg on January 23rd, 2006 at 5:12 pm