Ross and I had a very nice, uneventful and relaxing weekend, until Sunday night at 10pm. I was getting ready for bed and noticed a smoke smell in our bathroom. At first, I thought maybe I'd left my flat iron on all day and it was burning. I checked and found that it was cold and turned off. I put the smell out of my mind until Ross came in the bathroom and asked if I could smelled something. We looked around in our bathroom some more, wondering if it was maybe the lights. Everything looked fine, so we went into our bedroom and really started to smell smoke. We didn't find anything burning in our room so went to the hallway and guest bedroom where we noticed the smell got a little stronger.
At this point we were both beginning to get worried. My first thought was that I needed to get dressed and what did I want to wear that would last me forever...thinking my house was going to burn down and I'd have nothing to wear but the clothes on my back. It really hit home when Ross said "okay, I'm really starting to worry about this now." Ugh.....
Ross thought that maybe our furnace had caught fire. We have two furnaces--one in the basement and one in the attic, which is accessed through the guest bedroom closet, so Ross got out a ladder to look up in the attic. While he was doing this I ran outside to see if I could see flames or smoke. I smelled smoke the minute I walked outside, but didn't see anything coming from our roof. I did, however, notice flames coming from our neighbor's backyard. I didn't know what was going on...if they were having a bonfire, if they were burning something on purpose, or if their house was on fire. Everything was happening so fast and my mind was racing! I do remember thinking that it was odd that they would be having a bonfire at 10pm on a Sunday night. It was extremely windy that night, probably 30+ mph winds, and I thought how dumb of them to be burning in winds like this!
I went back inside and told Ross to come outside and look. He came out and ran over to the fence to see the flames coming from their backyard. He yelled to see if anyone was out there and I ran over to the neighbors to tell them what was going on. I rang the doorbell and it took a few minutes for someone to come to the door. I know they were wondering why someone would be ringing their doorbell this late at night. Mike came to the door and I told him something was on fire in his backyard.
Mike immediately ran out of the house, with no shoes on, and went straight to the backyard. When he got around the corner he found flames flying up into the air from his backyard and Ross, standing on the fence that separates our backyards, spraying water on the flames. Mike immediately got his garden hose out and started doing the same. His wife and son came out to help, too.
It turns out that earlier in the evening, Mike dumped his week-old fireplace ashes in the compost/small brush pile that was by the side of the house. He thought that since the ashes were one week old that they had had plenty of time to burn out, but that was not the case. The ashes were still smoldering and the combination of the dry ground, leaves, brush, and extremely high winds that night, started the fire. The fire was small, but it was enough to melt the siding on their house. Mike pulled off about six rows of siding that had melted and then sprayed the side of the house to cool it off some more. Thankfully, nothing else was damaged and everyone was okay.
We are so thankful that we smelled the smoke and acted as quickly as we did! With the winds that night, it would have taken no time at all for the fire to become one that a simple garden hose could not snuff out. And our houses are so close together...it could have very easily spread to our house. Mike and Cindy could not thank us enough, too. They were in their bedroom, which is on the other side of their house, and didn't smell anything at all. It is very scary to think about what could have happened, but we are so thankful for how it turned out.
No comments:
Post a Comment