I have a sneaking suspicion it's another one of those cognitive biases - get off a boat onto land and you feel safer. even if the boat will still be floating years after the land is.
You would be a fool to try the match trick in your apartment, but on an island? we just don't have that much experience of the earth blowing up around us.
then again the group of people who are first onto a volcanic island that popped out of the sea are a pretty self selecting bunch of foolhardy idiots :-)
What I'd like to see is that the locals could advantage of it and setup a natural gas mining operation, because they may have found a large pocket of it.
> Though they couldn't smell methane, they did put a match to the fissures from where the gas was oozing, and set it on fire.
> "We put the fire out in the end, but it was quite a hassle. Not even the water could kill it, unless one poured buckets over it."
Yes, this is what I always do when I encounter dead fish and an unknown source of hissing gas: light it with a match.
"Move fast and break things!"