Pay attention to the condition of your wiring and don’t let your tree dry out!
The linked article states that the Christmas tree was still up on January 19th (weeks after Christmas), and that the tree had been cut down about two months earlier.
This is a horrible tragedy, and the loss of life sickens me, but this seems like the height of irresponsibility to me. Who leaves a real tree up in their house that long?
Years ago, people put their real tree up a few days before Christmas, and took it down shortly thereafter. You can’t safely put a real tree in a house for two months. That’s just asking for trouble.
Were the lights plugged in (at 3:30 AM)? Doubly irresponsible.
house like that could have a live potted tree.
Six million dollar home and they couldn’t be bothered to spend a few bucks for fire sprinklers? Incredibly short-sighted, especially when the house was so far out that there were no hydrants on their street.
My tree is up. Hope I don’t die. I am responsible enough to have a small house, though.
This story has been all over the local news down here for awhile. . .many people were sure there was going to be some kind of foul play involved. That a Christmas tree fire could cause this kind of inferno and destruction is very surprising to me–I mean, I believe it, but it’s a bit hard to get one’s head around.
The article said the smoke alarms were functioning and triggered properly, so I’m still confused as to why not a single person managed to escape. Surely they would have gone off and woken up the residents before they died of smoke inhalation? Still not enough time to get out? Scared kids not knowing what to do and grandparents trying to save them?
The house was built just before Anne Arundel County passed laws requiring new construction to have sprinkler systems, but with all the other features the house had, it seems like an odd omission. Not that it helps anything now.
Grandparents could have had their hearing aids off; if the fire was slow, CO buildup could have narcotized everybody. ETA: the article says it was fast, so it’s more likely that they never had time to react.
I read recently that with modern construction, the time to escape a house fire has dropped from ~10 minutes to the three minute range. Add in the wide open spaces of that large house, and they would have to be half way out the door when it started to have survived.
Did you perchance read that right here on The Straight Dope Message Board? We had a Christmas Tree Fire thread just a few weeks ago, here. There, we learned:
The cause of this fire really surprised me. The news has been full of videos of what little was left and I found it hard to believe that it wasn’t arson. Such a sad story…
Having worked the scene all last week for my station I am not surprised. What most people don’t feel unless they were standing down that narrow little road was how isolated the home is from all the others - no really close neighbors to hear or see anything. So the fire was allowed to cook unnoticed for quite awhile.
Also, down those long, windy ‘neck’ roads, a quick fire response from the first automated call still takes a long time. And when the first engine pulled in and announced the ‘size up’ they lacked a hydrant and easy access for additional firefighting equipment. Even if the house was only 1/4 engulfed when the first units arrived, it probably took 4x the normal amount of time to ramp up the firefighting response than a normal suburban fire takes.
Finally, with regards to ‘they should have known better’ thoughts - given the number of homes out there the chances a fire will even take place in any one is so small. I can understand why the thought of a fire was not considered by anyone in the home.
I would also wager that local fire alarm and sprinkler retrofit companies will be very busy for the foreseeable future.
I think we need a new tradition of decorating a Christmas rock each year. We can still go out into the countryside and pick out the perfect rock to bring into our homes. We can still festoon it with ornaments and put presents around it’s base. But we won’t need to keep it watered and when the holiday is over we can safely move it outside and place it in the landscaping, to be looked back upon fondly as additional seasons pass.
Why yes, this did come from a geologist Why do you ask?
**lieu **- but that’s a Halloween tradition, at least for Charlie Brown… 
lieu, you already have a rock farm poised to take advantage of this new market, don’t you?
Yes, [del]lieu’s[/del] Loose free range rocks; Guaranteed fireproof and 100% organic.
That was an interesting thread. Another great link is this one, showing the difference between a watered tree and a dry tree. The dry tree goes up like a torch.
The Washington Post article mentioned several points which are pertinent. The Christmas tree was in the “Great Room” with 19" ceilings. That provides lot of oxygen for the fire. It also said that the bedrooms were connected to the Great Room. Additional reports say that the kids would have been trapped there, but also with a dry tree that size, it would have gone from a spark to becoming unsurvivable in just two minutes.
Growing up in the '70s, we had a real tree in the house for a month. 'Course, we tested every light strand prior to decorating the tree and made sure it never dried out.
One year we had a bit of the bubbly for New Year’s Eve cebration and decided rather than taking the real tree outside I’d just cut it up with a pair of pruners and toss the limbs into the fireplace instead for warmth and ease of removal. It was astonishing to witness just how much heat even the small branches generated as they were rapidly consumed by fire. It left me with the indelible impression that were an entire tree to go up at once it would create an conflagration that would surely engulf the entire room, house and inhabitants. I believe it was the very next year that we switched to artificial trees and I’ll never go back to the real again.
Also of note, this was a bad idea because what makes them so flammable is pine pitch and that will coat and accumulate within a chimney’s wall to the point where later it too can create a fireball that will again cause the possibility of catching the house on fire. Not good.
I suspect those things might contradict each other.