I was out shopping with my eldest daughter last week when I got a call from my husband. This was surprising as he works nights and at the time he called he would normally have been asleep. It took me a while to realise he was trying to tell me our neighbours house was on fire-we live in a terrace.
He had in fact been in bed sleeping but thankfully our smoke alarms woke him up. He called 999, alerted the neighbours on the other side of the house on fire and when I got home 15 minutes later our road was cordoned off and filled with vehicles with flashing blue lights.
As I've mentioned before, MadDadof7 has been diagnosed with a life limiting lung disease so we quickly got him checked out by medics and thankfully his oxygen sats were fine. Our neighbour was in a worse state as after racing home from work she had gone into the house to try to save her beloved Husky dogs who unfortunately succumbed to the smoke.
The house next door is structurally sound but badly smoke damaged. Our neighbours who have three childnre are going to have a tough 6-8 months waiting for it to be made habitable. Fire investigators located the cause of the fire - faulty wiring behind a socket so not in any way the family's fault. Christmas is not going to be very merry for them in a strange house without their familiar things around them.
The way our terraced houses are formed means my daughter's room is kind of puzzle-pieced into their house, while the boys' room shares an interior wall. A couple of days of cleaning, vacuuming and washing means the rest of our house is back to normal and after a couple of nights in our caravan we could move back in and use most of the house. However, the boys room still smells very smoky unless you keep the windows open (brrrr) and my daughter's room is frankly uninhabitable. A few minutes in there, even with a mask leaves you choking.
We have had a shuffle about and now we share our bedroom with our youngest son and our younger daughter is sharing with one of her brothers. She is being very stoic about it even though her wardrobe now looks suspiciously like an Ikea bag!
It makes me realise that without working smoke alarms this event could have been so much worse. It could have killed my husband even without his lungs already compromised, or we could have had a gas explosion wipe out the four houses in our terrace, and the people in them. It's desperately sad about the beautiful dogs-my husband is having flashbacks about trying to help our neighbour get them out of the house- but at least we aren't organising funerals this week.
The moral of the story? Check your smoke alarms and make sure you have working carbon monoxide alarms, especially at this time of year when more people have real fires and burn candles.
If you'd like to contribute to the Go Fund Me page for our neighbours to make Christmas a little more merry, here's the link: