The smell got me first; that sickly sweet scent of burning plastic that makes a person know at once that something is on fire that shouldn’t be. 

At first I ran around the house like a fool, looking for whatever was ablaze. 

Downstairs? Nope. It’s not the furnace. Living room? Nope, no flames shooting out the monstrous TV on the wall. 

It finally occurred to me to look out the window and there it was. A boiling fireball across the street with greasy black smoke curling like witch fingers into the sky. 

It was pouring rain outside but I tell you, that fire was cooking. The car itself could barely be discerned as the greedy flames consumed it. The roar of the flames and the snap, crackle and pop of various things succumbing to heat sounded like a conversation. 

My first thought was to rush toward the car to see if anybody was inside it. I got maybe three steps across the street when something exploded. There was a sharp bang followed by a hot rush of air as the tires gave up their air and rubber to the flames. 

Through the downpour, I could see that there were several people on the scene already. A couple were watching from around the corner of a shed, no doubt wary of what flaming car parts might rocket themselves forth in the next explosion. 

Across the street, a couple drivers had pulled to the side of the street where they seemed to watch with a kind of hesitant goodwill — like me, their instincts seemed to propel them toward the fire, but the ripping flames and random explosions kept them back. 

Burning cars are nothing to fool with, we all know that. We’ve all seen the movies where cars crash, burst into flames and then explode with enough force to send grown men flying backward for 100 yards before burning hubcaps come spinning out of the smoke to decapitate them. 

OK, those are some terrible movies I’ve been watching, but the point is that the average Joe doesn’t know what to do with a car fire. 

Fire itself is a terrifying beast, and here it is rampaging through a machine with a tank full of gasoline, motor oil burning inside cast iron cylinders, antifreeze boiling over inside aluminum chambers, and God knows how many other explosive chemicals live inside the gizmos, gadgets and doohickeys that power a modern car to take us from A to B. 

A burning car is something that just might want to fling burning goo like napalm into your face. That blazing ton of rolling iron might explode in just the right way to send a shard of steel spinning in your direction and the next thing you know, you’re learning to live with a blackened stump for an arm. 

Or so I thought standing there watching it burn. Who wants to mess with a flaming death machine like that? You might as well walk into the lion cage at the zoo and kick the alpha right in its tender parts. 

And then two cruisers pulled up and the cops who exited didn’t look all that intimidated by this flaming carnival of doom and destruction. They stepped into the street, pulled on their reflective vests and chatted a moment before driving off to the nearby intersections to block them off. 

Then the fire guys rolled up and I swear: in spite of the haste with which they moved, they looked more or less bored. They ran their lines, chatted over strategy a bit and then went about the business of dousing a car fire. 

It only took one properly geared firefighter, really. He dragged that hose to the car with all the drama of a bored husband hauling trash to the curb. When he blasted the still furious flames with water, foam or whatever the hell they use for car fires, the fire submitted almost immediately. The beast was tamed and then it wasn’t a beast at all; it was just a thick wall of putrid white smoke flying away in defeat. 

That rampaging monster of energy was vanquished so quickly, the rest of us just kind of looked at one another, marveling over the anticlimax. 

You can’t blame a firefighter for being less excited about a burning car than the rest of us — some departments average at least one vehicle fire, not per day, but per shift. And it’s hard to imagine a firefighter getting worked up over over a fully blazing VW when the last call he was on might have been for a fully involved gas station or a horrific five-car pileup on the highway.

But while the firefighter who doused the car did so without any drama whatsoever, I’m assured that these professional smoke eaters don’t take vehicle fires lightly. 

“While vehicle fires are common,” one veteran firefighter tells me, “no two can or should be considered the same.” 

When a vehicle goes up in flames, all sorts of hazards present themselves and newer technology, as it turns out, presents an extra level of danger. 

Increasingly common lithium batteries, for instance, pose a singular threat: as they burn, the lithium can react violently to water. Same goes for the batteries that power electric cars. 

Liquids like power steering fluids will explode in the flames. Tires will often overheat and blow right off the burning car, mowing down anything in their path. 

Windshields can explode, sending overheated glass fragments flying like odd shaped missiles. 

And if the intense flames and flying car parts don’t get you, that wall of putrid smoke just might. 

“As a car fire evolves and its many components burn and break down,” the firefighter tells me, “toxic gases are always present.” 

I rave about the quiet heroics of firefighters quite a lot because those heroics just never cease. Day after day, something somewhere explodes, catches fire or crashes at 85 mph on the turnpike and the nameless, faceless firefighters wade into the fray while the rest of us are running in the opposite direction. 

These crews are so well trained and so familiar with their foe that they make battling runaway fire look simple. 

Same can be said for the paramedics who wade into untold carnage and misery day after day to patch up victims of horrific trauma and keep them alive for the fast ride to the hospital. 

Same for the wildlife rescuers who hike into vicious snowstorms to pluck wounded hikers off mountain ledges. 

And so on, and so forth. We’ve got heroes all around us. They’re just so good at what they do, it’s easy to forget how lucky we are to have them.