If she had spent two minutes watering the embers, this whole mess would have been avoided.
Wouldn’t they make an *adorable *couple?
Here is the New York Times article on the funeral held yesterday for the three daughters, described by their mother in the funeral service as her “little girl tribe.”
Heard that part on the news this morning. Don’t that just crush your heart…
No. My wife and I found it infuriating. It is so much easier to just lie to your kids about Santa’s magic, who would ever think of such a literal solution to a make believe problem?
That’s pretty heartless.
You misspelled rational.
I wasn’t trying to spell rational.
Fire environments are not a “standard crisis” situation They are an ongoing crisis until stopped or escaped and without massive amounts of training every nerve in our body is screaming “RUN YOU FOOL!” Small children are also more likely to escape on their own than adults in many circumstances as they can run full speed under thermal inversion layers that would kill an adult two feet higher up. The other side of the coin is that if a child decides poorly and manages to yank away and dive into a closet or behind some heavy piece of furniture, they are pretty much screwed unless someone can get to them inside of a minute or two.
Radiant heat in enclosed spaces is ugly, if you have ever been in front of a large bonfire you get uncomfortably hot 5-10, sometimes even 20 feet away from the raw amount of energy being released. Now make that an uncontrolled house fire and all that heat has noplace to go until it starts breaching walls and ceilings. Even after a heavily involvedroom has been put out it is often still to hot inside to breathe without risking respiratory burns.
Retrieving someone from a fire is kinda like retrieving wounded in no mans land during a battle. It can be done, but only at immense risk by those trained and equipped to do so with the proper tools at hand and a plan. Others may pull it off, but you are more likely to end up dead than a hero.
That’s pretty heartless.
He had them in hand. How many 7 years olds do you know who would bolt ahead because they knew they could get under the inversion layer better than he? Every child I know would be holding my hand so tight it would hurt. The same goes for myself. I don’t care how hard they’re pulling away so that they can save their dolly, there’s no way that I’ll let go. He was a contractor, I think he had the strength to control two young girls. I can’t know the exact situation of course. But if I lost one I’d be damn sure to hold on to the other.
If you believe his story. I don’t. I think he went upstairs to get the kids and was overwhelmed by the heat and flames. They weren’t his kids and I don’t know his motives in the relationship. I think he opted for self-preservation.
It was foolish and unnecessary to scoop the embers out of the fireplace but the explanation about the children’s concern seems reasonable if I assume that they had not used a fireplace often. I also think he holds the majority of blame for the embers setting the house on fire. She may have been the creative visual type, but he was the hands-on, practical contractor. As such, should be fully aware of safety precautions like not pouring water on embers, not putting hot coals in a paper bag, not leaving same inside the house. He presumably has managed people with torches, welders, soldering irons and sparking power tools. Basic safety is a large portion of a construction supervisor’s job. I believe he was thinking with his little head and took a few shortcuts in order to get into bed before she changed her mind.
The house did not have a Certificate of Occupancy. A C.O. establishes that the property is certified to be occupied. That includes having smoke detectors.
This is one point I would never argue with the municipality about. You cannot legally occupied a premises without a C.O. Nor should you.
I feel really bad for that poor woman, but this is one case where she thought “the law doesn’t apply to me,” and paid dearly for it.
Living here in Connecticut, this story has been getting heavy news coverage. It’s absolutely heartbreaking.
My first reaction was similar to that expressed by others: why remove the embers at three in the morning, when they were still likely hot?
However, when I heard that the embers were removed because the girls were reportedly worried about Santa getting burned coming down the chimney, I can totally see that. It’s all well and good (with 20/20 hindsight) to say that the girls should have been told, “Santa is magic; he will be fine.” However, I can totally see an eager-to-please boyfriend offering to take care of the embers after the fire had died down, especially if presented with three whining, overexcited young children (and their exhausted mother).
Secondly, it was recently reported that the embers were in fact disposed of outside, not in the house. The resulting flames apparently started the fire from outside the house after being fanned toward the house by an outside breeze. In addition, a news show demonstrated how long it can take for embers to flare up inside of a trash bag: as much as 40 minutes before causing the bag to burst into flame!
The real oversight was not having battery-operated smoke detectors, but how many of us might have overlooked this or not gotten around to it yet in such a situation, especially when the house was still being renovated, and hard-wired detectors were going to be installed shortly?
I have the required hard-wired detectors installed all over my house. However, over a year ago, I read that all homes should be sure to have both photoelectric and ionization detectors installed, to quickly detect both smoldering as well as fast-burning fires. All of my hard-wired detectors that were installed by the builder are the ionization type, though, so I bought some backup photoelectric detectors to install as well–over a year ago. Guess what I was finally installing the week after this Christmas tragedy?
Similarly, how many people reading this routinely test all of their detectors periodically? How many replace all of their smoke detectors every 10 years, as recommended? How many have CO detectors, test them routinely, and replace them every 5 years, as recommended? (How many people know that these replacement recommendations are because of the increased risk of detector failure over time? I didn’t, until recently.)
My point of all this is that it is easy to throw stones. Tragedies like this could happen to any of us. “There but for the grace of God go I,” and all that. 
A long time ago I lived in a house with a woodstove in the basement. A few days after we moved in we were rushing around getting ready for company and were going to be playing games in the basement so we emptied the stove of ashes and rebuilt the fire. I didn’t yet have a proper container to hold them and the fire had been out for several hours so i put them in a cardboard box and then put that box into a snowbank on the back deck.
A couple hours later when a guest went outside to smoke they found a hole in the back deck. Seems the ashes weren’t that cool and they’d melted all the way through a foot of snow and then burned a perfect hole in the deck. Had there been wind this easily could have been us and the only exit from the basement was the door outside of which we left the ashes. I was MUCH more careful after that.
Not at all surprised, poor thing:
Me either. It’s a terrible situation all around.
Here’s a link to a news article about it:
Mom Who Lost Kids, Parents in Christmas Fire Attempted Suicide: Report