(Fight Fire with Fire t-shirt now on sale at the NeatoShop)
Now before you start breaking open fire hydrants, know that this was a special case. Capt. Craig Moreau, a firefighter in Houston, Texas, was driving from Austin to Houston on Highway 71 when he spotted a tractor trailer by the side of the road. One of its wheels was on fire.
He stopped and found that the brakes had caught on fire. He and the driver fought the fire with a small fire extinguisher that Capt. Moreau kept in his car, but it wasn't enough:
"I crawled underneath and thought we'd got it out but it flared back up," said Moreau, who was off duty at the time. "So I said to the driver, 'what have you got in here?'"
"It's beer! It's all beer," the driver said of his cargo of Coor Banquet beer.
So the two men opened up the trailer. They shook cans of beer and sprayed them at the fire. It worked! They put out the fire. But their victory came at a heavy cost. Perhaps it was worth it:
Praising the sacrifice of perfectly good beer, Fire Chief Terry Garrison said in a statement, "I support the extinguishment of fire, no matter what the cost."
-via Dave Barry