Anyone who lives out in the country with lots of property knows that it is important to consider your neighbors when you’re doing something like burning brush.
In this case, the neighbors unattended brush fire spread onto the poster’s property, and she gave them an earful because of it.
Was she too rude when addressing the issue?
Let’s check out the details and you can decide for yourself.
AITA? Burn my land?! No thanks!
So I live in the outback country of Australia.
Seems pretty normal so far.
Every year in winter we all do back burning to prevent bush fires, letting our neighbors know when we’ll be doing it so we don’t cause alarm and so they can keep an eye out as well.
Our neighbors do the same, it’s actually a requirement with the fire department that we alert the firies and our neighbors.
Last week my aunt came home from work in a panic because one of our paddocks was on fire and so was the nature strip in front of it along the road.
Oh wow, how careless.
Turns out our new neighbors (only been in the area 2 months max) had started burning off on their property and it had spread to ours while they went off lighting more fires in other areas on their land.
We went and put it out using several fire extinguishers and water.
I went looking for our neighbors on their land to find out what they were doing.
I was less than happy to be honest.
She’s a lot calmer than I would be.
I found them and told them that ‘it would have been nice to be informed’ they were going to be burning off and that their fire had spread to our land.
They were extremely cavalier about it, basically shrugging their shoulders and saying ‘fires are hard to get going here’ which isn’t true.
It was a windy day and the fire could have rapidly spread to other neighboring properties.
I told them they need to stay with fires they light and alert the neighbors.
That it isn’t right or fair what they’d done.
I guess you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, but still.
My nan says I should have put the fire out and approached them later, after I’d calmed down, invited them over for tea and spoke to them about it then.
That going onto their property to berate then was rude.
Most of my family are on my side but a few agree with Nan.
AITA?
On the one hand, the neighbor deserved to be berated. On the other, you often get better results by being more cordial.
Let’s see what the people in the comments think about this situation.
Yup, they started a wildfire.
They need to learn how to do this safely.
Yes, Nan is likely right.
They put the whole neighborhood at risk.
Yeah, the fire department needs to know about this.
You can’t just start a fire and let it burn wild!
It seems like that’s something everyone should know.
If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.