60-year-old fire extinguisher a window to the past

By Steve Van Kooten

Normally, Phil Burgress appears in the paper because he has something old — a million-year-old rock or fossilized relic from a time before humans or even mammals — were a twinkle in the universe’s eye.

But on September 7, Burgess had something very different sitting in his backyard among the bones and stones: a 1960’s soda fire extinguisher.

“Back then a lot of the business establishments had soda-and-acid fire extinguishers,” he said. “Now everything has changed over to CO2 and dry-chemical extinguishers, mostly.”

The enclosed metal cylinder stands approximately two feet tall, with a large handle on the top and a small hose attached to the side. 

According to Burgess, Brad Steiner gave him the extinguisher a few years ago after it was discovered in the basement of a building on Beaumont Road near downtown Prairie du Chien.

Previously, the building was a fur warehouse owned by Steiner’s father, and the extinguisher is one of “all kinds of old stuff” they found stored there.

Burgess is familiar with the antiquated extinguisher’s design because his father, Raymond, became Prairie du Chien’s fire chief in 1965 after Clem Voth retired.

“My sister and I would help recharge those extinguishers,” he said. “On [my father’s] days off, he would pick me up, and we would go around to some of the businesses downtown and discharge and replenish them.”

Soda and acid is one of several outmoded types of extinguishers that are not approved by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to fight fires due to safety concerns for the operator, hazardous components and inefficiency. The mixture worked by cutting off the oxygen supply to a fire, effectively smothering it.

“Inside the extinguisher, there’s a metal basket with an open bottle of sulfuric acid, and the extinguisher was filled with soda water,” said Burgess.

To use the extinguisher, the operator had to flip it over while handling the hose to activate a chemical reaction between the acid and water. The extinguisher does not have a trigger, so the user had to aim the hose as he or she flipped the canister around.

“As soon as the acid would hit the soda water, it would foam and shoot out of the end. Once you do that, you can’t turn it off, and it discharges the whole thing,” said Burgess.

The maintenance sticker says the extinguisher was last checked on July 3, 1965, by Burgess’ father and someone named Collins. It is possible that it has not been recharged or touched in decades.

Burgess said, “It’s probably just water in there now, but I’m not going to tip it over to find out.”

It is not a pre-Cambrian fossil, but the fire extinguisher is a cultural artifact — a small window back to a time that exists as a distant memory for those who were alive at the time and as dusted-off stories for people who weren’t born yet. Even if it’s not a Tyrannosaurus skull, it’s still valuable because it shows us how things were done in the past.

Burgess’ curio may not set the world on fire, but that is the opposite of what it was designed to do anyway.