FIRE!!

Fire has always been one of my biggest fears.  On Monday that fear came to life for me.  I was sitting here in the middle of the afternoon, had just started a load of laundry to wash and smelled something hot.  I had just used the tea kettle on the stove so I thought that it was just something on the burner.  I dismissed the smell until it didn’t go away – and as I was getting more concerned, the power started flashing thru-out the house and I heard a funny noise.

I got up and went to towards the washing machine and heard the sound of electrical arching – I hate that sound.  I was stupidly wondering why the hell a breaker hadn’t popped when whatever it was shorted, and then realized I should probably do something other than stand in a panic!!  I grabbed the main breaker switch and flipped it off but the noise continued and I freaked the rest of the way out!  I grabbed the dog and ran for my mom’s house.

I called 911 from moms and then ran home again to move my truck and my brothers car.  Waiting for the fire department was horrible.  Because we live in a trailer, 2 towns responded – as most people know, when trailers catch fire, they GO!  Thankfully in our case there were a couple of things in our favor. 

#1 I thru the main breaker almost immediately

#2 the source of the fire was electrical and those electrical wires were not against the floor of the trailer, they were laying on the cement pad under the trailer.

Here are a couple of pictures - 

Apparently what happened was, before we moved in, my grandmother had an addition built on the back side of the trailer.  The people who did it were morons anyway due to various other things that they screwed up when they did other work.  Anyway – for one reason or another, the house did not have a proper (or “up to code”) vent for the dryer.  The vent was a plastic hose that was blowing directly onto our water holding tank.  The dryer has also for all of these years been blowing on the electrical wires which dried them out to the point that the main electrical wire melted thru and caught fire. 

Thankfully the damage isn’t that bad and we have a great electrician who happened to have just spent the weekend camping with Vince, Dad, Uncle Doug and Grampy Al!!  He was here yesterday afternoon and we got it all put back together! 

HOWEVER!  Because of a couple of code violations (the dryer vent for one) we have to have an inspection by the code enforcement officer before we can officially move back in.  We have to have hard wired smoke detectors, which were originally in here, but they were so SUPER sensitive that at some point not long after we moved in I took them down and now I can not locate them.  We DO have battery powered ones but apparently that’s not good enough so we have to fix that, the dryer has to be vented properly and we had to have an “illegal” wiring job fixed – that part has already been fixed and we’ve bought the proper vent for the dryer and will get new smoke detectors tomorrow. 

We are taking this opportunity to completely clean out the house and try to have a “fresh start” – I’ve been attacking each room with bleach and spic n span!  Nothing like a very thorough spring cleaning right?  Hopefully we can have everything together by Friday so we can get the C.E.O. out here and we can move back in.  For now, we’re living in a camper trailer in the driveway!  :)