It’s easy to forget sometimes that it’s not just fire that can damage your house, but smoke too.
A year or so back, a friend of mine who works from home had just heated some soup for lunch on the stove, when his next client turned up a little early. He was convinced he’d turned the gas off, yet within five minutes, the client and he had evacuated outside onto the front drive, dialling 999 and watching smoke gently billowing under the kitchen door and into his hallway.
Luckily, the fire brigade arrived promptly and extinguished the flames, and the actual fire damage was limited to the kitchen cabinets nearest the stove. However, a few charred cabinets were only the beginning of the story, as he soon discovered when he was allowed back into the house only an hour or so later.
The damage in the kitchen, and the need to have all the electrics and appliances tested, he expected to see. The mess caused by water, foam and smoke in the kitchen, he also expected to find, and indeed this was cleaned up within hours by a professional team sent by the insurers.
However, nearly everything on the ground floor smelt of smoke. Two leather jackets hanging in the hallway were so impregnated that even professional cleaning would not get rid of the smell. Every curtain, every carpet, every sofa and chair had to be steam cleaned. Even his books and papers, safely out of harm’s way in the front room, had a whiff of burning kitchen cabinet about them!
Needless to say, my soup-supping pal has now installed fire safety devices to help him know about any fires in his (new) kitchen, before he notices the smoke.
1. a fire blanket and small extinguisher mounted on the kitchen wall
2. a mains heat detector in his kitchen
3. a 10 year battery smoke alarm in his downstairs hallway outside his office doorway (and not near the kitchen door), just in case!
And yes, his wife did ban him from eating soup at lunchtime ever again….
photo by techne at flickr.com
