The last time freshman Andrea Olsen accidentally started a fire in her kitchen stove was in January of 2021.

“Well, it was my fault. I was cooking egg rolls, and they were decent, they weren’t even that good. The oil from the pan splashed over onto the really hot burner, and then it went up in flames. And this was at 1:00 AM, so it was a pretty wild early morning,” Olsen said.

Olsen was making dinner for her family and in the middle of trying to finish quickly, flames began erupting from the electric stove.

“The egg rolls were supposed to be for dinner, but it didn’t work out. I had started at around 5 p.m., so as the hours went by I began to stress out,” Olsen said.

She then saw the oil splash over and quickly combust into flames.

“I took a step back and I yelled, ‘mom, there’s a fire’ and she turns around and she’s like, ‘Oh’ and you could see the flames from far away. My sisters were on the couch and they turned around when I yelled and they could just see flames. The flame was tall and was reaching up at our cabinets and everything. I started freaking out and my sisters came around into the kitchen and I’m like, ‘What do you do with an oil fire,’ and my mom was like, ‘I think you throw like flour soda on it,’” Olsen said.

Her mom came to Olsen’s aid and helped her put out the fire.

“So she’s just slowly walking into the pantry while the thing is burning to find flour and she throws it on there. That ended up burning. We then figured out that you throw baking soda and then you put something on top of it to smother out the oxygen. But meanwhile it was just smoking, so I put a big pot on top of it,” Olsen said.

As Olsen and her family figured out how to put out the fire, her dad casually came by to see what was happening.

“And then my dad, who’s asleep in his room, which is right on top of the kitchen, came downstairs and was like, ‘Did someone say fire?’ He then sees the carnage, takes an egg roll, eats it and goes back upstairs,” Olsen said.

In the aftermath of the event, Olsen and her family were able to safely put out the fire and clean up the area.

“Once the fire was out and we had cleaned up, the stove became crusty and rusty for like a week,” Olsen said. “We had to put this special liquid cleaner on for a few days before it was fully clean.”