They want residents to hand them in at their Mobberley Road station in return for a £5 voucher to buy a new deep fat fryer.

"Chip pans now injure more people than any other single cause of fire," said fire service spokesman Evan Morris yesterday (Tuesday).

"We always notice an increase occurs in the number of jobs around 6pm because people are cooking tea."

The deal - which runs until the end of the month - is part of a determined effort to ban chip pans in Knutsford and cut the number of burns caused by exploding fat.

"An unattended pan can ignite within minutes," said Mr Morris.

Deaths and injuries occur when people panic and try to move the pan or douse the flames.

"Throwing water on a chip pan will make it explode or cause a fireball which is horrendous," said Mr Morris.

Instead residents should throw a damp tea towel over the pan and turn off the heat.

Firemen said they'd prefer people to use deep fat fryers which stop the fat becoming too hot.

THIS week the virtues of the potato are being celebrated in National Chip Week.

British people eat more than one million tons of potato crisps a year.

The humble spud - brought to England by Elizabethan explorer Sir Walter Raleigh - didn't catch on at first because it belonged to the poisonous deadly nightshade family. Some people even thought the potato was a cure for impotence.

Converted for the new archive on 13 March 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.