Fire

This past week in our new hometown of Ohakune has been an interesting one. We were all settled into our new home when disaster struck! I had come home early from work because I could at about 7:30 pm and Vicki and Meaves (the guy who lives in the bus behind us and shares our house) where about to go to one of our friends house for a little bit, so I decided to go with them. About an hour later, we left so that we could get home and watch our Monday night TV shows, Desperate Housewives, Grey’s Anatomy, and Nip/Tuck. It was at this time that we opened the door to our house to find that it was filled with smoke. At first, Meaves, Annie, and I tried to go in to see what the smoke was all about, but Annie had to turn around because the smoke was too thick. So, Meaves and I ran in to try to open the door on the other side of the house to get the smoke out. Meaves couldn’t get the door open so he went to putting the fire out that was next to the pot belly stove. I kept trying to open the door and finally got the stupid lock to unlock and opened the door after what seemed like a few minutes. All along this time, Meaves and I probably took in quite a bit of smoke, which didn’t feel very good the rest of the night. Just after I got the door open, Meaves got the open flames out and we opened up the rest of the doors and windows of the house to get the smoke out. While all this was going on, Annie was calling the fire brigade. The volunteer fire brigade siren then went off and about 8 minutes after the fire was out, 2 fire trucks arrived on the scene(little overkill if you ask me). By this time, we were all standing outside freezing and wandering what had happened. After about an hour, the fire brigade had done their work of hosing, axing and chainsawing through the floor where the fire was, as well as crawling into our ceiling and doing a lot of standing around since there was about 16 of them.

So, the fire chief then told us what he thought had happened. We (mostly me though) had clothes hanging up on the drying rods behind and to the right of the pot belly stove. What they think happened is that a piece of clothing got too hot (which were wet before I left) and fell onto the stove and wood pile. This eventually caught fire, which caught the woodpile on fire, which then caught the rest of the clothes and our box of fire starting papers on fire. This then burnt through the floor and that is when we got home. We found out the next day that if we had been in the house just a few minutes later, the gases in the ceiling would have exploded from the heat and blown all the windows and probably killed Meaves and I! So, that was comforting and I might not ever run into a smoke filled house again. Of course, when this happened, I wasn’t really thinking much about this and it was more instinctive. It also appears that the drying rods that are on the wall are illegal as well as the stone pad underneath the stove, which is supposed to be a foot bigger in all directions. This makes me wonder what else in this shed is not up to code too!

I must say though, this is my first house burning incident and it’s amazing what a fire that size can do! First of all, our entire house reeked of smoke for a few days. Then, everything in the house is covered in soot and is pretty hard to clean off of the walls and such. There are other things that have happened that are weird too. The window on one door is cracked from the heat, which makes me believe the exploding house theory. Also, there is a “No Smoking Please” sign that was untouched and was right next to the fire, but posters and a calendar across the room were wrecked. So, this is our third day of pretty full-on cleaning and we hope to be moved into our house again tonight, as Meaves has been kind enough to let us all sleep in his house-bus with him. We have had to wash everything we own, along with all the beddings and stuff, which will, in some ways, make this place cleaner that before we moved in, sans the walls and ceiling. It also appears that we will no longer have the pot belly stove and they will be replacing the ceiling and the worst of the walls. The worst part for me though is that I lost half of my clothing, much of which was my favorite warm socks, favorite t-shirts, expensive chef clothing, and a pair of jeans. On the good side though, I should be completely covered and reimbursed through my travelers insurance!!

So let this be a lesson to you, my friends. Don’t run into burning buildings, don’t smoke, get insurance, make sure to have smoke alarms (we didn’t, but do now) and extinguishers, and Desperate Housewives saved our house from exploding!