Fire in the toaster oven

So, this morning, I made toast. Rewind. I was in a gigantic hurry and very stressed and I tried to make toast, but burnt it badly. In my aggravation, I pulled my toast out of the toaster oven and brutally turned the knob to the off position, or thought I turned it to off. It turns out that I had actually turned it past off to the highest setting of bake--oops. Within a few minutes, due to the charcoly, fallen pieces of food on the floor of the oven, the machine had caught on fire and was spewing flames that kept growing larger and larger. I was on the phone with a PhD student whose dissertation I was editing and all I could think to do was to turn off the oven (for real this time). The fire didn't go out, so I told the guy on the other end of the line to hold on and ran and woke up Joel who was sleeping. "There's a fire! The toaster oven! The toaster oven's on fire!" I whispered as I shook him, pointing toward the kitchen. Luckily, even in his half awake state, Joel had the presence of mind to unplug the oven. First step toward success beautifully executed. Unfortunately, the fire still didn't go out and actually got bigger. So Joel took a pot of water and dumped it over the oven. This second step toward fire safety certainly put out the fire but we figured out after the fact that electrical fires should never be put out with water. Oh well. Next time (hopefully not) we will use baking soda.