When you see a part of your home burning, the first thing that goes through your mind is “What stupid thing did we do???” You blame yourself and wonder what you left on or plugged in that you shouldn’t have. I immediately thought of the simple light switch timers that we had installed the week before. We put two of them in, one for each of the block heaters on our trucks. The heaters help the vehicle start better in the cold and they warm up faster but they only need to be on for a few hours before you start the car. So, we put the timers in to save money on electricity. The “manual” for the timers was still sitting on my kitchen counter on the morning of the fire. I immediately started to beat myself up for the choice of those timers. Why did we put those in? To save a few bucks? Look what it saved us, I thought!
By the time the fire was out, I could see that our new neighbors shed had partially burned. The siding was gone and some of the roof was scorched. The neighbor behind us lost his siding too. It is just a melted mess. The fire marshal told me they call vinyl siding “plastic gasoline for fires.” It melts and just adds fuel to them.
We each had to give separate statements to the police. They told us the arson investigator was on his way.
WHAT? ARSON?
When you hear that, you again beat yourself up. Arson? Do they think we started the fire? Why would we? Did we do something to make them think this is arson? You immediately feel guilt even though you know you didn’t do anything
The first question the police officer asked me was “Does anybody not like you?”
Now, I consider myself a pretty likeable person but I am quite certain I have ticked off my fair share of people in my time. Have I ticked them off enough to burn down my garage? I don’t think so. I sure hope not.
We were both asked a lot of questions about what was plugged in, where things were in the garage. We both told them to the best of our recollection.
The fire investigators spent a lot of time looking around in the garage and at our electrical box in the house and they quickly zeroed in on Mike’s brand new Ford F-150 pickup truck. We have had the truck for about 6 months and it only had about 6,000 miles on it. It still had the new car smell. It was a pretty truck.
Before long we saw them cover the engine compartments of both trucks with big blue tarps. The investigator came in side.
I was nervous, remember, I had just heard the word "arson" in the minutes before. He told us that it looked like the fire originated in the engine compartment of Mike’s truck and that experts from our insurance company and Ford will have to look at it. He told us to stay out of the garage because the structure was not safe and the one remaining wall could fall down.
Then he said “there is nothing in there that you can save, it is all gone.”
I started to cry.
Then he said “this is all just stuff, you can replace it. Rest assured, you did nothing wrong and you did not cause this in any way, arson is also no longer a concern.”
I started to cry more. Finally, someone was telling us that this wasn’t our fault. That it just happened and was going to happen regardless of the precautions we took or how careful we were. We didn’t do anything wrong. I suppose my tears were much like a sigh of relief.
After the investigators left, there was a steady stream of visitors. Mike’s Grandma heard about the fire and came by. She brought donuts. There is something about food that just makes you feel better! Mike’s parents were there a couple of times. The last time was to drop of a van for us to drive until we bought new cars. Mike’s boss. Our insurance agent. The claims rep. More TV stations. The phone rang constantly. My Mom and Dad. Jodi. The claims rep for the cars. I cried with each familiar voice that I heard.
The kids were scheduled to be in the backup daycare that day. They love backup daycare. I couldn’t get them there because we didn’t have car seats for the borrowed van.
In the few quiet moments of the day, we couldn’t do much. I am a roll-up-your-sleeves kind of girl and I couldn’t touch a thing. If it were up to me, there would have been a flatbed there that day to take away the burned out trucks. A roll-off would have been there and that garage would have been coming down. We couldn’t do much more than sit at the kitchen table and stare at the mess. And stare at it was exactly what we did. We are still staring at it.
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