“It was smoke, not a fire. There’s a big difference,”
– NSW Railcorp spokesperson CieJai Leggett after an electrical fault in a train air conditioning unit caused 1500 people to be evacuated and one taken to hospital.
“What [CityRail] class as a fire and what we class as a fire seem to be two different things. You don’t have smoke without a fire.”
– NSW Fire Brigades spokesman, Craig Brierley.
SMH, 2 July 2008.
“… he was a good boy, he was a good man, everyone he knew loved him,”
– Rose Boulos, sister of murder victim Charlie Boulos, on her deceased brother.
Police said they had established Mr Boulos had been selling and using the drug ‘ice’.
The Age, 1 July 2008.
“When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.”
– Humpty Dumpty
Andrew Norton 
Anecdote – about 2 years ago I was on a cityrail train which appeared to be smoking. Told staff on the train and subsequently heard that that line was shut down for a couple of hours due to a (potential ?) fire on a train. This was underground.
Fires in tunnels can be very dangerous!
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What the hell kind of name is CieJai? Even without misrepresenting basic scientific principles, anyone with that name can have no credibility.
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I have no problem with the first quote from the City Rail guy. He was differentiating between degrees or risk or harm, and it was a fair differentiation. There could no doubt have been many more than one person taken to hospital had there been a fire – in the conventional sense of the term – on said train.
What disappoints me is that these often important distinctions get discounted or dismissed in much modern media commentary.
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