Our House Fire

Sorry no pictures. Pictures are not the first thing on your mind when you have a fire in your house. Here is the Story.

Last Wednesday night like most nights around 5:00pm I (Pamela) was in the kitchen getting dinner ready. Steven had just come home from work and we were talking about our day. Suddenly we hear a loud noise that I would describe as a rumble (now that I know what it was it was an electric arc if you have experienced that sound before). After the loud noise my lights dimmed and fluctuated up and down. We freeze for a moment and try to figure out what happened and then I start to hear sparking noises coming from our basement. I opened the basement door and see flashes of light coming from the direction of the electrical box and call out to Steven that we have a fire in the basement. He ran down to see what was going on and see that there really is a fire in the electrical box so he races back upstairs and asks for a fire extinguisher. Thanks to his quick thinking and our knowledge of where we even had a fire extinguisher as well as the fact that the fire extinguisher was powder not liquid he was able to run down and put it out. By this time the children are huddled in the corner together and Miranda is crying while trying to hold Jackson back from going down the stairs and Jacob wants to go fight the fire with daddy.

Needless to say we were all safe for the moment, the fire was out, but we had no power; well I shouldn't say no power because our dishwasher never stopped running and the clock in our bedroom was still on, weird I know. But because we felt like we had it under control our first call was to our landlord, who thankfully rushed over quickly with news that there was an electrician on his way as well as the power company to see what needed to be done.

The electrician came and said that he would not be able to start work on it until Friday (this was Wednesday mind you) and that it was bad and would take 3 days to fix "WHAT" Also he said he didn't feel safe for us to stay there that night unless the power company cut power to the house all together. That was fine with us we cut power and decided that we were going to make at least one night work sleeping in he house. We bundled the kids up and sent them to bed. We still held our discussion with the missionaries that night and they thought it was great, then I took all our frozen food over to a friends house that had some extra room in there freezer.

All in all it was a crazy night and we went to bed with the prospect of having to move out of our house for three days to wait for this to get fixed. The next morning brought blessings and I am so grateful for it. Our landlord had found electricians that could get to work right away so starting at 7:30 the next morning we had the electricians in and out, we had the power company, the city inspector, the insurance claims guy, and our landlord.

Come to find out it was just a very old breaker system that is not equipped to handle high electric loads and it blew. The fix they did was just a good temporary fix until spring so they can do more substantial repair but we have been assured that it is safe it is ready and it can handle it. It took all day but they had the power back on that next day around 3:00pm. So 22 hours later we were back in business, as apposed to 3 days, I was thrilled.

Everyone that came in the house said over and over again that we are so lucky that Steve acted fast, that we had a fire extinguisher and a the correct kind of fire extinguisher, we were so lucky that it even put it out because often electrical fires just don't go out. I am here to tell you that is was not luck it was a direct blessing from my heavenly father. We are so blessed that it was not worse, we are so blessed it didn't happen last week when the high outside was 10 degrees. By the way with our fireplace in the living room I was able to maintain a temperature of 58 degrees all day, that is pretty darn good.

We are blessed and thank our father in heaven for the protection he gave us.

Love

Pamela