What would you do if your house burned down?
1I came online this morning and on my Facebook wall were many notifications about an acquaintance who's place was gone. She had many cats (rescues) and ended up in the hospital because she tried to go back inside to save some of them.
Four were saved (she had more than that, we're not sure how many, but suffice it to say, it's a sad, sad situation). The neighbors got one of them, when the firemen let the animal shelter in, they found three on tables in the flooded basement.
She was self-employed, worked from home (public relations).
Another online friend started a gofundme for her, to help her get by until insurance comes through.
But I sit here and wonder, what would we do should something like this happen to us? Fire scares me. It scares me more than anything else. And it's so hard to imagine the unimaginable.
Here's a link to photos of her place. She's in the hospital now, no one has spoken to her at this point. Her niece (who lives in Las Vegas) posted on her aunt's FB page and that's how we found out about it.
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@lisaviolet I would cry. Presuming my family was safe, I would be heartbroken for the things that can't be replaced..wedding photos, baby blankets, etc. Then I would have to pull up my borrowed big girl pants and figure out a way to make a home again for my family; things can be replaced, love of family and support of friends cannot be undervalued. I hope your friend has the strength to persevere. It sounds like she has friends who really care.
@mikibell She does, she's tough. I think the hardest thing for her to move past will be the cats. Thank you.
I'm so sorry for your friend. That is just devastating.
House fires are just about the only thing that truly terrifies me. After having kids, that fear only got worse. We rented a crappy trailer for three years while we recovered from respective divorces (giving our credit time to rebound and save up for a house) and I was terrified because I know how quickly they go up. I'm hearing impaired and my kids' rooms were at the other end of the trailer. I did drills with the kids regularly on how to get themselves out of the windows and where to go if the smoke detectors went off in the night. I was so scared I wouldn't hear it and would sleep through it all and they'd try to find me or something.
Anyway, we now own a three-story town house. This scares me even more, because our bedrooms are on the top floor. I don't know what would happen. I told my husband when we were looking at it that if we bought it I'd would insist on safety ladders in the bedrooms. We've been here since February and still don't have any damn ladders.
Not sure if your question is referring to what one would do during a house fire, or in the aftermath. I don't think I'd make it out alive, to be honest. First and foremost, I'd get my kids out. Then, I'd do what needed to be done to get my dogs and cat out. I couldn't bear not trying to get the pets out too, you know?
@PurplePawprints Christmas present for the family. The ladders. Do it. Looking at those photos, if that fire started on the bottom floor? Get the ladders. Do it tomorrow. You'll most likely never need them, but on the off chance you do? Get the ladders. We all try to do everything we can to be safe. There are many things beyond our control. This isn't one of them. And thank you for your response.
@lisaviolet Money is a little tight right now with Christmas stuff, but if we haven't by the time we get our tax refund, I'm going to make sure part of it goes to buying the ladders.
@PurplePawprints You mentioned being HOH, do you have a smoke and/or carbon monoxide detector that is geared to the deaf and HOH? A friend of mine from college days is legally deaf and the college installed one in his dorm room. It had a visual strobe as well as an extra loud alarm. Thankfully he never experienced a fire although the dorm next to his did and one of my lunch buddies died in the fire. ETA: Technically Joel (my lunch buddy) died of smoke inhalation.
@msklzannie I'm sorry about your friend. :-( No, we don't have one though I've looked into them. All of ours are wired together (I think it's code now, but you know, one goes off and they all do). Anyway, I haven't researched it enough yet to figure out if one that strobes will wire in with all the others. If not, then it's kind of pointless. It's something that's a pretty important concern to me, but my husband is the breadwinner and is less concerned about that sort of thing. (Which is why we still don't have the damn ladders.)
@PurplePawprints Yeah, it really sucked. He was engaged, and as I recall, the wedding was only about a month away. If I'm doing the math right, I think it's been 17 years earlier this month since the dorm fire. Just now, I was looking at deals on Amazon for the alarms/strobes to post on deals.woot. Unfortunately trying to post a deal from a tablet is a little troublesome. Anyhow, here is the results page of my search (some are hard-wired options) http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/s/ref=is_s_?ie=UTF8&k=smoke+detector+deaf
@PurplePawprints I forgot to mention that at least one of the strobes must be hardwired I and connected with the same brand of smoke detector.
@msklzannie That really is tragically heartbreaking. Fires are horrible, but there's something so devastating when they claim lives. I have been lucky to have never experienced one personally, but there was one that happened about ten years ago down the road from me that haunts me to this day. Thanks for the link. I'll check it out tomorrow when I'm more coherent and likely to process what I'm looking at.
That is awful for your friend… and sad about the cats. I'd likely do what she did and try to save my cats.
@Kidsandliz Same here. Our backyard fence is fixed so that the cats can't get out of the yard. In a fire, I'd open all of the doors to help them get out. Even so, we've got cats who never go outside, who have their little hiding spots. Former ferals. And it just scares me to death. And even when you take every precaution in the world, sometimes things happen that are out of your control (I know someone who had a kitchen fire started by the timer on their microwave!). My first thing would be the cats, too. Right now I'm seriously thinking about setting up the 3TB external drive I bought a few months ago, backing up all of our computers and starting to scan all of the photos I've got from my mom and dad (who have both passed) and all of the ones I took with a film camera so if something happens, I'll have those. And put the drive in our firesafe. I don't have much jewelry of value (sold it a few years ago to have money for the emergency cat fund). Really don't have much else that couldn't be replaced. Just pictures and kitties.
@lisaviolet Sorry for your friend. Backups is a good idea, but I wouldn't rely on just the firesafe. If you can swing it, grab another drive to put some photos and documents on and keep it off-site somewhere, even if it's just buried in trunk of car parked outside, etc. Or cloud.
@mehjohnson That's a good idea. Thank you. We do park our cars in the driveway.
@lisaviolet Anytime. As long as loved ones are safe, photos are the thing people usually miss the most. You could even load smaller memory sticks and ask relatives/friends to hold them for you. Ease the mind a bit more.
@mehjohnson I have always kept a portable drive with important records in my desk at work. I'm retiring in a month and won't have that resource any more, so I am just gong to give them to my best friend to shove in a closet at his house. It will be harder to keep them up to date, though.
I've had a house fire myself and yeah it sucks. Got to stand there and watch all my shit burn. On the plus side it taught me that I don't need all that shit to be happy
As awful as it would be to lose everything, I'd just do my best to gather myself together and start over. Oh, and I'd blame @lisaviolet (at least during this month).
@parodymandotcom That would make me sad.
@lisaviolet In that case, I'd only blame you if you started the fire. I hope you don't happen to have any pyromanical goat tendencies.
@parodymandotcom No tendencies towards fire starting. We're all safe there.
I've never been in a house fire. But one Saturday night about 15 years ago my girlfriend and I came home from dinner with friends to find our basement apartment flooded after a fire three apartments above ours. It turned out the couple in that unit had been doing a B&D scene and, in the throes, the guy who was tied up knocked over a candle, which hit a curtain. If you don't read the comment, we can end the story with my girlfriend, our two cats, and I being mildly inconvenienced but otherwise fine.
Unfortunately, the guy who wasn't tied up was a real coward and ran, leaving his partner in that situation. But he managed to get up and over to a window, which he broke and jumped out of. Hands tied from three floors up. He didn't make it, in a really gruesome way. It made the news.
@editorkid And he'll have to live the rest of his life with that on his conscience. The only candles we have here are the ones that have batteries. Too many close calls with cat tails in the past. I'm glad you all got out safely.
@lisaviolet I know they didn't have any pets, but given their activity, cat tails may indeed have been part of this story.
@editorkid Oh, no, you dint! You didn't just say that....
@lisaviolet Sorry, the ball gag slipped out. (Is there an emoji for that?)
@editorkid Yes, there is...
@Cinoclav
@editorkid That is without a doubt the most perfect response gif possible in this thread. I'd almost like to post it again in response to you.
Every time disaster strikes people, earthquake, fire, or flood, the victims always lament the loss of pictures. I have tons of pictures. I have over 60 years of pictures. I never look at them. They’re stashed all over the place. When I die I expect someone will come across them and just throw them out. As time goes by I have less and less a desire to keep pictures.
My brother is an avid picture taker. He’ll easily take 30 shots of the same damn sunset, and not delete a single one. He sends me discs that are loaded to the max, I mean, like a 1000 pictures, most of them duplicates. I have a stack of his discs, never looked at. How long does it take to go through 1000 pictures?
@Teripie As a hobby photographer with (checks iPhoto) 31,063 photos in my library, I agree. I keep bad photos and dupes to learn from them, but over the decade I've been doing this, I think I've shown a couple hundred to others. If they were into it, they'd be taking pictures too, and once or twice a year I mention my site on Facebook in case friends just want to see them on their own time.
@editorkid I take thousands of pictures, mostly of travel. The best ones go into printed photobooks and are highly sought after by those who travel with us and a few friends and family who live vicariously through us. I will take a dozen pictures of the same thing, but I usually pare down my initial file by about half. This by no means eliminates all the duplicates and bad shots, just the blurry, accidental or straight up identical ones. Hard drive space is cheap, memories and the travel to get them is expensive. People and especially pets are ephemeral, photos are the clearest way to fix them in my memory.
@Teripie I can see that, but if you didn't get tired of all those pics previously, and had almost no pics from different eras of your and loved ones lives, you might lament them more. Not to be overly sentimental, but I get why people feel bad about loss of pics, and other reminders of past.
Sorry about your acquaintance and her cats. I would gladly trade all my photos and physical things for a guarantee my pets would be safe if my house ever caught fire. We humans can plan escape routes, turn doorknobs, break windows, etc. to escape but the pets don't have those abilities.
We have inter-connected smoke alarms so if one goes off they all go off, in hopes we will be sure to hear the alarms in our sleep. I am going to purchase a fire ladder now too - thank you for the suggestion.
@hallmike It looks like what started her fire was either a humidifier or air filter. Her smoke alarm went off, she came out of her upstairs office to see what it was and the machine, which was on the first floor, was smoking. Then it caught on fire. She got one cat and went out the backdoor. She never went back inside, but she did beg the firemen to save her cats. It's looking like she lost nine or ten. Hopefully, some made it out (miracles do happen). Yeah, get the ladder. Thank @PurplePawprints for that advice.
We live in a modular home (doublewide) that we special ordered. The bedrooms have doors to the outside. Did that mainly so I could get to a bathroom quicker when I was working outside. But it's a great comfort knowing it's a sure exit we'll hopefully never need in an emergency.
@Teripie That was a great idea. One less thing to worry about.
@lisaviolet So sorry to hear about your friend and her pets.
make smores
I am a planner by trade and vocation, so I think about this a lot. My order of evacuation: 1. Pets. 2. External drives containing photos and other records. 3. Original art, mine and other artists. After that it depends where I am, but there's nothing else in the house that's irreplaceable. I have a pretty generous home insurance policy. My bedroom is on the second floor but there's a large deck with french doors coming out of it and the pets sleep in my room, so we all have a ready evacuation point. The hard drives and a lot of the art are also in my room. Getting my 140lb senior dog safely down is a challenge, but my bedroom door is a solid core wood door and my house is adobe, so I should have adequate time to toss the mattress and a big pile of clothing down from the deck and pull off one of the safety rails to shorten and cushion the fall. I am a super light sleeper so sleeping through the alarm is not a concern. BTW, I was recently at a talk by the fire chief and he said the #1 survival tip for fires is of course a fire alarm, but the #2 tip is to always have the internal house doors closed. He said an open door gives you about 2 minutes to get out and a closed door gives you at least 12 minutes. Those 10 extra minutes mean a lot in an evacuation.
Good info. 140 old lbs, whooof.
@mehjohnson A good friend of mine, tall and striong, lives about 5 minutes away so if there's time the plan is to call him and have him come rushing over to get the canine handoff. Get me and the pets on the porch, dial 911 dial my friend, then assess what options I have as far as retrieving stuff from the bedroom and tossing it into the yard.