Smoking is bad for you

The picture is the scene from the master bedroom of our home in October 2006.  At that stage it was a rental property and we had a family of 6 staying here.  Their 15 year old son had taken up smoking, apparently, but didn't want his family to know about it.

This was his bedroom where the fire started.  Apparently he set fire to his mattress earlier in the evening and thought he'd put it out.  Naturally he didn't share this info with anyone else as they'd know he'd been smoking.  Alas, he was wrong about the extinguishment of the butt.

A few hours later he was woken up by a mattress fire and it was too late to do anything much about it.  The fire had taken hold, it had gotten into the roof cavity and it was well alight.  Naturally the neighbours were alerted, the family cleared off out of the house, and while waiting for the fire brigade to arrive, started working with garden hoses from the outside.

I remember my next door neighbour, whose house was perilously close to the seat of the fire, saying he spent the longest hour of his life using the hose on the bedroom, waiting for the fire brigade to turn up trying to protect his own home.  It apparently took them ages to get here, which is interesting given that the fire station is actually in the same suburb as us!

At the time, Sharon was staying up at her parents' house in the country, and I was on my own at home at Narara.  At about 3:45am the phone rang.  It was the police.  They asked me "are you the owner of {address}?"  I replied yes.  They then told me they had some bad news.  There had been a fire and there was extensive damage and I should get around to inspect the place as soon as possible.

The first thing I did was fish out the insurance policy from the lever arch file.  It was landlord's insurance with NRMA Insurance, and it was most definitely current.  So I drove over to the house, and you could see the pall of smoke clinging to the valley which got worse as I approached.  I parked somewhere nearby as there were fire appliances, police vehicles and an Energy Australia truck all over the place.  There wasn't much I could do, and in fact the firies simply told me to stay out as it was dark and rather unsafe in the house.  I spoke to the tenants briefly who said their dog had gone missing, presumed dead.  Fortunately he turned up a day or two later.  He had obviously run a mile, petrified of the events.

After about ten minutes, in which I gave permission for fire investigators to take samples later on, I went back home.  In reality the visit to the property was a waste of time.

The funny thing was, despite receiving such horrible news, I was not in the least bit surprised.  The tenants were five weeks behind in the rent, and we were thinking very seriously of evicting them anyway.  This at least gave us a perfect excuse for us to get them out of the house!  And everything was insured anyway.  So it wasn't too much of a catastrophe, although it was quite a large inconvenience.

A funny thing was that the tenants were quite religious people in spirit.  (They drank to excess, gambled, took illicit drugs and weren't remiss about not paying their rent, but they were devout Christians).  There were  Christian icons all throughout the house.  We have a lot of pictures of the fire damage to the house, but the adjacent one shows the protection offered by his lord Jesus Christ:

I suppose the punch-line to all this was a few days later when I was asking them about arrangements for their possessions still in the house and arrangements for their future accommodation.  After being five weeks behind in the rent, and causing over $100,000 in damage to the house I was asked, if a little sheepishly, "When, do you think, can we get our bond back?"

I'll blog further on the house fire, as it wasn't all cut and dried.