MAGNA — Throwing water on grease fires. Mismanaging that turkey fryer. Letting a Christmas tree get thirsty. Yes, we are coming into an especially flammable time of year loaded with holiday fire hazards.

“The holidays are absolutely busy for us,” said Unified Fire Authority’s Benjamin Porter.

The numbers are staggering. The Federal Emergency Management Agency stated, “ nearly 156,000 fires in the United States occur during the winter holiday season. ”

They cost hundreds of millions of dollars in damage every season. And worse, people get hurt. Most of those fires happen while cooking.

At Unified Fire Authority’s training center in Magna, firefighters agreed to help me test out some of the things we are warned not to do.

Getting a handle on cooking fires

We started by cooking up bacon

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