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Just how bad could it have been if the electrician had not located that loose connection yesterday? Sadly I saw it firsthand just a few hours ago.
I went to get Ben from school like normal today, and since I was about ten minutes early I decided to swing by the main campus to pick up something from the school office. As some background, the Princeton House Charter School was founded ten years ago by three mothers who were seeking better services for their autistic children. One of them, Carol, owned some property that was appropriate to build the school on directly adjacent to her house. As such, the main campus for the school is on the same property with her home. The campus that Ben attends is about a mile away, although that will change next year. In any case, when I arrived at the main campus this afternoon and got out of my car, I noticed black smoke coming through the roof vents of Carol's house. Right about then, several panicked teachers and administrators came running by. The house was cleared of any occupants, but they were unable to locate the cat before it became unsafe to enter the house any longer. A few minutes later the emergency vehicles arrived, by which point the living room of the house was fully engulfed. I heard someone mentioning that Carol had been having electrical issues for the past few weeks, and had had electricians out on several occasions. As I understand it the electricians were never able to track down the problem, and the last one had cleared the house as being safe. Clearly he was wrong.
Poor Carol was completely distraught. Her family has had a series of bad things happen to them this past year, and this is going to be a huge blow to her. I assume the house was fully insured, and that she will be made whole financially, but at the point I left the big bay window on the front of the house had been smashed out by the firefighters and the living room area was obviously destroyed. Given the amount of black smoke that was coming out of the house, it is safe to assume that virtually everything in the house has been smoke damaged. There are just some things that no amount of money can replace. I don't know if the firefighters were able to rescue the cat or not. I hope so. Cats are pretty good at hiding and staying safe.
The whole time I watched this going down (as I was also running around and helping re-route the traffic of incoming parents to pick up their children), all I could thing was just how easily that could have been our house. That first electrician who came last week didn't seem to think that there was anything wrong with the wiring. If I hadn't had the second electrician come back, and if he hadn't been persistent enough to spend so much time looking for the loose connection in our walls, then it could so easily have sparked enough to set the house on fire. The possibility of that just makes my skin crawl.
I went to get Ben from school like normal today, and since I was about ten minutes early I decided to swing by the main campus to pick up something from the school office. As some background, the Princeton House Charter School was founded ten years ago by three mothers who were seeking better services for their autistic children. One of them, Carol, owned some property that was appropriate to build the school on directly adjacent to her house. As such, the main campus for the school is on the same property with her home. The campus that Ben attends is about a mile away, although that will change next year. In any case, when I arrived at the main campus this afternoon and got out of my car, I noticed black smoke coming through the roof vents of Carol's house. Right about then, several panicked teachers and administrators came running by. The house was cleared of any occupants, but they were unable to locate the cat before it became unsafe to enter the house any longer. A few minutes later the emergency vehicles arrived, by which point the living room of the house was fully engulfed. I heard someone mentioning that Carol had been having electrical issues for the past few weeks, and had had electricians out on several occasions. As I understand it the electricians were never able to track down the problem, and the last one had cleared the house as being safe. Clearly he was wrong.
Poor Carol was completely distraught. Her family has had a series of bad things happen to them this past year, and this is going to be a huge blow to her. I assume the house was fully insured, and that she will be made whole financially, but at the point I left the big bay window on the front of the house had been smashed out by the firefighters and the living room area was obviously destroyed. Given the amount of black smoke that was coming out of the house, it is safe to assume that virtually everything in the house has been smoke damaged. There are just some things that no amount of money can replace. I don't know if the firefighters were able to rescue the cat or not. I hope so. Cats are pretty good at hiding and staying safe.
The whole time I watched this going down (as I was also running around and helping re-route the traffic of incoming parents to pick up their children), all I could thing was just how easily that could have been our house. That first electrician who came last week didn't seem to think that there was anything wrong with the wiring. If I hadn't had the second electrician come back, and if he hadn't been persistent enough to spend so much time looking for the loose connection in our walls, then it could so easily have sparked enough to set the house on fire. The possibility of that just makes my skin crawl.
From: (Anonymous)
no subject
My thoughts go out to Carol, and her family. I hope kitty made it okay.
miws