As an alternative to propane, it would seem infinitely safer but still requires caution.  Stove fuel burns at sea and in isolated ares appear in many stories.

Coincidentally I was just pricing fire blankets on weekend.  $10 and up, crazy not to have one.

And thank you to those with experience about water and wet towels working on alcohol.  Makes sense to cool and dilute.  Don't be confused with a grease fire  that will explode with water turning to steam.

Fireblanket and a remote extinguisher are on the shopping list.

Bad luck, Jan. I'm glad you both came through uninjured. A fire aboard is many sailors' worst nightmare.

Alcohol might be a relatively safe fuel, but no combustible fuel can be completely safe, and we are always going to have to rely on cookers that are robustly built, with good quality control over the build processes. Sadly lacking in this case, it seems. Still, a leaky propane cooker would have had much worse consequences.

I once had an alcohol fire aboard. An idiot crew was pouring meths into the priming cup of the Taylors, didn't see that the cup was full and kept on pouring - and pouring - and pouring - and then lit it. I grabbed the fire blanket and draped it over the whole cooker area, which was immediately effective in dousing the fire. Since water is actually the safest way of dousing an alcohol fire, a wet towel would be better than a dry fire blanket.

A cup of water is also effective, safe and clean. How do I know that, you ask? In the course of my alcohol cooker experiments, I've had some less than optimal experiences, shall we say. So I carry them out in the kitchen, with water close at hand, and with the cooker in an old roasting tray that contains leakage of alcohol and the water that I pour onto it when things go awry. 

We had a minor fire aboard Palinurus, our Westerly 22, yesterday evening.

She spends the winter on her bilge keels on a beach in our local bay and we move her across to our nearer cove to get ready for the season. Keeping within Covid-19 lockdown rules we moved the boat out to the mooring proper and seeing as it was the nicest day of the year so far we decided we'd have dinner on the boat, which we did!

We brought the Compass24 Spirit-Stove 3000 with us. As mentioned before, we had complained to Compass24 about the poor standard and broken parts on this stove when it arrived. In fairness to them it made no financial sense to ship the stove back to Germany from Ireland to be fixed and they refunded the cost in full.

We reckoned the stove might do us for a while even if it didn't seem as well made as the Origo3000 so into the boat it went.

I filled both tanks with just under a litre each of Fanola bio-ethanol. (Manual says 1.1Litre max).

I lit both burners to see how they burned. Same as Origo.

We realised we'd forgotten a saucepan so turned off the right hand burner.

Cooked the pasta on the left hand burner, put in a bowl.

Cooked the sauce on the left hand burner.

Turned off the left hand burner.

Started eating in the cockpit.

Cook thought there was a funny burning smell......

RIGHT HAND burner which had been extinguished half an hour previously was in flames, flames coming out vent in the front of the cooker.

The boat wasn't fully equipped but amazingly there was an old fire-extinguisher that the previous owner had put behind the cooker, and as I installed this stove I thought what a silly place for an extinguisher that is and placed it on the chart table. I couldn't remember if you could put out a meths fire with water and we didn't have anything resembling a fire-blanket so I let loose with the Class-A extinguisher, having never used one before. Well, the blue powder and asphixiating ammonia smell starved the fire of oxygen promptly and had the same effect on the crew. Raises many questions about fire-extinguishers on small boats!

We did manage to enjoy the rest of our dinner and a glass of more potable alcohol on the coach-roof, upwind of the fiasco.

We were glad we were on the mooring, worse things happen at sea!

Some extracts from the Compass24 Manual:

"Do not place any objects on the cooker during cooking or cooling down, and never leave the cooker unattended". Well, we placed a saucepan on it during cooking and, hands up, there was a saucepan lid on the right-hand burner when dinner was served, remember that this had been extinguished half an hour previously. We keep our Origo3000 by our sides all day now and never leave it unattended ;-)

"To turn off the flame, set the knob to 0 and wait a moment. To be on the safe side, turn the knob all the way up again. If the flame does not reappear, the cooker has been extinguished. Set the knob back to 0."

Hands up again, we didn't do this on the Compass as we never had to with the Origo. But, take note: this instruction does not say to also check the neighbouring burner in case the one you were using has reignited it. We also think that this wasn't the problem. 

The Compass tanks are not as deep as the Origo ones, the wire mesh and ceramic-fibre are down in the tank. The Origo has an upwards molded mesh. There is simply too much much space in the Compass burner for a flame to keep smoldering. Crucially though, the Compass tanks leak! If stood vertically, after a few minutes fuel drips  out of the seam at the top outside edge of the tank, this does not happen with the better made Origo.

We are fairly sure that the most likely explanation is that the right hand burner was leaking vapour out the edge of the tank which was then ignited by the left hand burner we cooked on just before we stopped cooking. It was like a giant Trangia burner with quite impressive flames. 

We are of course informing Compass24. If anyone has one of these cookers, please check the integrity of the tanks and test it on-shore before putting it on a boat or in a camper-van, and have a fire extinguisher to hand as it says in the manual, or perhaps a large damp towel or fire-blanket.