House Fires & Consequences
Have you ever seen the Fire Service posters where a child has scrawled “You forgot to check the smoke alarm batteries Daddy?” on a charred wall? What a horrible thought - that as the house was burning down around him, your child was vindictive enough to be heaping blame on you instead of bothering to escape!
Anyway, this leads me to an incident that happened a couple of weeks ago at my in-laws house. As they slept that night, someone set fire to a shed at the back of their house. The fire caught on quickly and spread to the house, filling it with smoke.
Their neighbours noticed the fire and started kicking the front door to alert them, but they didn’t wake up. It was only when the (badly placed) smoke alarms went off that they woke up and scarpered. The Fire Brigade later theorised that they may have already been affected by the smoke fumes - explaining how difficult it was to wake them up.
The Firemen also explained that the fire had almost reached the cavity layer and had it gone that far, the whole house would have been engulfed by flames. Apparently a few minutes later and they wouldn’t have stood a chance. Five minutes from being a headline - 5 people dead, 4 adults and an infant.
Now before you ask, I have an alibi! I was tucked up safely in bed far from the scene of the crime!
A few days after the incident, we were talking about it and it suddenly occurred to me what the unforeseen consequences might have been if the worst had happened. Being among the most immediate family members, we would have been expected to:
- Make funeral arrangements. My first thought was “how the hell would we afford 5 funerals?”
- Mrs L’s 11 year old brother was luckily out of the house on that night. Had the worst happened, we’d have become his full-time carers. There are a couple of immediate thoughts:
- Is our house big enough? We look after him enough to be able to adjust to living with him, but do we have enough room to share our house permanently?
- How would we work in commitments to keep up his relationship with his grandparents and other relatives? Particularly on his Father’s side, they’re not people we know very well.
- Other issues like do the in-laws have a will, how to handle their property and stuff like that. We’ve been lucky enough not to have too many deaths in the family and none close enough that we’ve become involved in the arrangements. Who helps out with this sort of thing?
Moving on, the bizarro part of the story is that, two days later the mother-in-law was bitching and moaning about the inconvenience of having to put in a new kitchen and having her house professionally cleaned! Everything is a problem to the mother-in-law, and having escaped with her life and her house more or less intact, she automatically went looking for problems.
Anyway, I’d never thought too hard about how something that happened to extended family would affect us. But obviously there are consequences. Another is that now I’m glad the mother-in-law doesn’t offer to babysit our kids too much, because what if they’d been in the house that night too?
