The Japanese used to call the winter season "cherry blossom" time due not to the emergence of spring and the celebrated blossoming of cherry trees, but the winter appearance of wood-framed, paper-screened houses heated by small kerosene burners going up in flames.  There still remains a problem in Tokyo and beyond of houses built to insecure standards creating household infernos. 

But domestic fires are not unique to any one country.  I am always amazed during the summer season when there are fires that destroy homes and sometimes kill the inhabitants through smoke inhalation if not direct contact to the fire itself as they sleep.  Homes throughout North America are directed by law to be equipped with fire and smoke alarms, but people often carelessly do not replace smoke alarm batteries or they may turn them off as nuisance noise-makers. 

And then there is the issue of pyromaniacs, people deliberately setting fires, fascinated by their deadly beauty and power.

There have regularly been many fires deliberately set in rural areas in the Ottawa Valley where barns are set afire and the animals within them sacrificed to some demented fire-absorbed moron's fascination with fire.  Yesterday, in Ottawa, a 30-year-old man who is said to have suffered from mental issues was arrested for setting fire to his wheel-chair-bound 56-year-old mother's bedroom, killing her, and imperilling the lives of many other people living in that apartment complex.

Earlier this week a fire of unknown origin consumed a three-floor building complex of modern construction in the Black Forest region of Germany, killing fourteen people.  This was a complex operated by the Catholic charity Caritas, serving people with disabilities, teaching them a trade, giving them employment.

And a few days before that, 112 people died in impoverished Bangladesh in the conflagration that overtook an eight-storey building housing a garment-producing factory whose clothing is sold throughout the wealthy West through name-brand purveyors of both inexpensive and quality wear, produced by cheap labour. 

Workers in the factory, desperate to escape the flames and the suffocating smoke found emergency doors locked, fire extinguishers inoperable, no way of escape other than by leaping to their deaths through multi-storey-high windows.