Kitchen ranges have always had safety issues associated with them—-whether they were old style wood or coal burning units or modern gas and electric units.
Back in my “hippy days” my first wife and I lived, for four years, in a Ferro-cement dome-house—–a quarter of a mile off the main road—-without electricity. Our means of cooking and heating the home was a stove much like the one pictured on the left. You could cook anything you wanted—-there was just a significant “learning curve” is all.
One safety concern that often gets overlooked with kitchen ranges is making sure that the surface of the range is higher than the surrounding countertops—-especially when those countertops are made of materials that will burn and/or melt.
The idea is that if the top of the stove is lower than the adjacent countertops, any big pots or pans that extend past the edge of the stove can come in contact with the countertop surface (as can be seen in the picture below). 
This next picture shows a gas stove.
One can see where the flames have spread out under a large pot or frying pan and have charred the countertop. While more critical with a gas stove, these clearances are important—if for no other reason than to keep the kitchen from smelling like burning plastic.
By Charles Buell, Real Estate Inspections in Seattle
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