Eight years ago yesterday our house was virtually destroyed by an electrical fire in our son's bedroom. What follows is an account of the day after. The first thing we did was meet the fire investigators at the house so they could show us how they had determined the origin of the fire. As we drove up to the driveway of the house we began to gain a sense of the destruction. Soot from the fire had deposited itself above the side door entrance to the house. It was a black layer that was baked into the stucco from the top of the door to the top of the exterior of the house nearly sixteen feet off the ground.
As we approached, we saw that the side door was covered in a black oily film. We would become very familiar with that black oily substance in the weeks and months ahead. When we entered the house we were expecting the worse. We got it. The place gave us the same feeling we would have gotten if we had encountered the dead body of a friend of the family. It was dark in the house because all of the windows were coated with oily soot. One of the first things the fire department did was cut off the electricity and gas. There were no lights to turn on to get a better look but we could see as well as we wanted to see. We had just re-painted and installed new carpeting throughout the home the previous summer. There was at least ¾ of an inch of standing water in most of the front of the house. The carpet was a gray paste from the ash.
The stick of the artificial Christmas tree Kristi had decorated was still standing, but the branches had melted and sagged. Priceless hand-made Christmas tree ornaments, made by Kristi’s grandmother out of real goose eggs more than fifty years earlier had crashed to the floor and broken as the branches drooped. Presents still under the tree were covered with melted plastic. The brand new Lazy-Boy sectional furniture units we bought recently were black instead of tan. Everything in the entire interior of our home was coated with a film of oily black soot.
We slowly headed down the hallway to Davey’s bedroom where the fire started. In the hallway picture frames had crashed to the floor and the contents were charred beyond recognition. Eighty percent of the door to Davey’s bedroom was charred to the point of disintegration though what was left was still hanging on its metal hinges. The devastation in Davey’s bedroom was shocking. His bed, cabinets, entertainment unit, clothing, and electronic components were strewn together in a macabre heap. The mass contained items that were melted, charred, or so covered with oily soot that they were unrecognizable. Not a single personal item from my son’s room was salvageable. He had suffered a complete loss of every material possession he had except for the clothes on his back and the things he had left in his car.
The fire investigator pointed to an electrical outlet in the southwest corner of the bedroom and began to explain how they knew it was an electrical fire. I did my best to stay with him during his explanation, but my mind was racing. It was like a war scene. Fortunately, nobody had perished. Only “things” had been destroyed. I reminded myself of the pact I made with the Lord on the way to the house when I didn’t know whether Davey was safe. Now it was time to accept reality. As my mind drifted back towards the words of the fire investigator, he was asking me a question about something. This was towards the end of his explanation of the fire’s origin and the nature of determining fire origins. I must have had a dumb look on my face. He repeated the question and I answered it. I don’t remember what it was.
We went to the first spare bedroom, which was on the street side of the house. The window had been bashed in by firemen during the fire fight. The door to this bedroom was charred too though not like the one across the hall on Davey’s bedroom. Chards of glass both large and small were spread all over the king sized bed in the room. Again soot was everywhere and there were Christmas gifts still in plastic from the store. They were melted to the bed spread. A bookcase containing video-cassette tapes of our favorite movies had the remnants of a melted plastic frame on the top of it. The video-cassettes were covered in soot and warped. Next we went to my nephew Jack’s bedroom, which was also on the street side of the house. The window had cracked from the heat but had not been broken by the firemen. Everything in Jack’s bedroom was covered in soot. His computer was partially melted. Down the hall we went to the first bathroom. The door to the bathroom was in nearly as bad a shape as the door to Davey’s bedroom. The door to the furnace closet was burned badly too.
The first bathroom had suffered severe heat and smoke damage. Next came the den, which is in the middle of the house. The den contained a love seat, couch, sewing closet, computer desk, a sewing desk, a television, and our home desktop computer. The casing of the computer monitor was warped, as was the television. The on-off switches in the entryway to the den were melted and the plastic from the switches and covers had run down the walls like candle wax. There were two ceiling fans in the den. The heat was so intense in there that the fan blades had drooped. Instead of the fan blades spreading out horizontally they were nearly vertical. Our initial inspection continued into the back portion of the house where the master bedroom and bathrooms were. The smoke damage was incredible. Everything, even in the very back of the house in the utility room, was covered in an all too familiar layer of soot. I opened drawers to my dresser. The steamy oily smoke had penetrated the drawers. The clothing in the drawers was black.
All the clothing items in the closets were covered with soot. Everything we touched resulted in soot on our hands. The oak furnituree had a layer of soot baked into the surface. The walls were black. The bathroom fixtures were black. Our washer dryer and deep freezer in the utility room were black. Our books were black. Everything was black. We returned to the living room. My 60-inch big screen television was melted. The screen looked like a gigantic waffle. Video-cassettes on the top of the speaker units were melted to the surface. The kitchen was in similar condition. In the pantry, which bordered Davey’s bedroom, five-pound bags of sugar had been solidified into blocks of a glass like substance by the intense heat. The skylights in the front and center of the house had either shattered or bubbled up like chewing gum. It was cold and dark inside the family home that morning as we surveyed the damage. Signs of Christmas were everywhere, but the signs were gray and black instead of red and green. Things were either, melted, warped, or covered in soot.
After twenty-minutes in the house the toxic air was more than we could take. There was so much soot in the house it was thick in the air. A wave of nausea came over us and we went outside. We were homeless. It was time to find lodging. It would be eighteen months before we rebuilt our home. Eight years ago today I was on the phone. It was five days before Christmas. For the first time in decades I was looking for a house to rent.
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