FIRE'S AFTERMATH

(Methuen FD photo)

I haven't been around many house fires.  When I was twelve, a fire broke out in a house up the road and a young child died.  Not long after that, our house was struck by lightning, and we had a manageable electrical fire.  The volunteer firefighters thought they were returning to the same house that had burned near ours, that's how close together in weeks (days?) the incidents occurred.

As an adult, I've lived in very old houses.  Several of these houses had faulty wiring.  When my kids and I lived in the house two away from where I live now, every time we turned on the furnace in the basement for the first time in a season, the attic would spark up and the fire department would have to come -- every October like clockwork.  I currently live in an old house that was remodeled decades ago, but it's still a little nerve-wracking considering the house's age.

My worst fears, though, come to roost this week.  A house I used to live in with my late husband and my two oldest children caught fire and incinerated in less than an hour.  We used to live on the third floor, and I always worried the place would go up.  It's something that you keep in the back of your mind always when you have children and sleep in separate rooms from them on opposite sides of a house.  There's that latent fear that you won't wake up in time, or the alarms won't work, escape is too high from safe ground, or you're just too far to reach them, grab them, get them to safety.

(Lawrence Eagle Tribune photo)

The end result is disaster for the house that burned the other day; it's gutted.  One person was injured, but no one died.  This fire happened after dinner but before bed, and only one of the apartments, the third floor, had multiple bedrooms, so there's a good chance no children were sleeping in the house.  I don't know.  I cannot seem to get any news updates; everything is very generic.

The pictures and the videos, though, are not so generic.  They are absolutely horrifying.  Chilling.  Frightening.  Shocking.  It's a reminder of why I keep safety escape ladders in the upstairs bedrooms.  It's a reminder why I took the smallest bedroom, the one in the back of the house, as my own; it is the farthest away from escape in case of a fire.  It's a reminder that not only are structures fleeting, but life is fleeting.

(Lawrence Eagle Tribune photo)

And, I'm sorry for those affected, but it's a reminder how damn glad I am that I don't live there anymore, and how horrible it would be to lose everything, and how close my family was to total abject horror.  I look at the after-pictures and think, "That was my daughter's bedroom.  My son slept there.  There's nothing left of my bedroom, my living room, my kitchen..."  Worse is knowing there were only three choices out: The long back staircase over the addition's roof, the front staircase straight into the fire, or a three-plus story leap onto the pavement.

Nope, I haven't been in nor seen many house fires, but this one, even decades removed from living there -- this one hurts.