Reflections From a Country Girl

My son is organizing things at his apartment and wanted me to help him out.  I jumped at the chance. I mean, how many of us have tried to get our kids to clean up just to become exhausted trying.  Of course, he is almost 25 and decided it was time to dispose of some things he’s had since middle school and before. 

Most of it was movie props, etc. Let’s just say he has thrown away six 30 gallon bags of trash and taken a number of things he will no longer need to the curb for others to get some use out of them.  

One of the things he said he could do without is an old remote control car.  It still worked so I suggested I take it home to practice my “manual dexterity.”  

The nine volt battery was dead so we took one from my fire alarm just to try it out.  It worked, we played with it for awhile, put the battery back in the alarm, and set the car aside to get another fresh battery tomorrow.  

It was about 11 at night at my place and I had a load of clothes in the wash.  I took time to slip the clothes in the dryer and began saying my goodbyes to my son so he could head on back to his place.  Some of the lights went out in the kitchen and I thought that was strange.  No sooner had I said something to him about it did the fire alarms all go off. 

Yikes…something was on FIRE!

Smoke began to fill the rooms.  We ran through the house looking for the fire, found flames shooting upwards at the back of the dryer, ran to get the fire extinguishers – both of which were EMPTY, and finally grabbed the crockpot, filled it with water, and doused the fire quickly.  

The smell of burned plastic and singed metal filled the air.

Firealarms still blaring, we opened all the doors to get the smoke fumes out and threw one more round of water toward the back of the dryer. 

What a mess.  

It took awhile to discover that the motor on the dryer had caught fire.  We cleaned the area up and discovered lots of water but little damage – except to the dryer.

We were lucky.  Very lucky!

Ok.  So I am one of those people that leaves the dryer on when I go out of the house or starts the load of dirty dishes before going to bed at night. 

We all have done that from time to time.  I am a regular at it.  

At least I was until this.  

Now, when I go out, I feel like flipping the power box off to the whole house! 

I don’t go that far, but I DO unplug or turn off every light that is on.  I am also going to have an electrician to check everything out and, of course, am in the market for a dryer.  

We were lucky.  I almost decided to wash those clothes in the morning and put them in the dryer while I went grocery shopping.  If I had done that, my house would have been toast.  

My wish for you today is that you NEVER, I mean NEVER leave a dryer, dishwasher, or any appliance on and that you regularly check your fire extinguishers and fire alarms. I also suggest you turn off most, if not all, lights when you leave.  You just never know when something could go wrong.  

~ Joellen

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 11:33:am and is filed under Life & Events, Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.