February 1986. I was bartending at the restaurant by the ferry and when I got off work around midnight I would go into Coupeville and drink a few drinks there and go home. We lived about 2 ½ miles from Coupeville. I left the Tyee bar about 1:30am and was driving home and saw a house with all the lights on. I noticed a stained glass window just above the front door and it had yellow and green in the pattern. I work in stained glass so I stopped the car and was looking at the pattern of the piece and thinking I could make that, but would change the colors. I drove on home and had a few more drinks. About 3:00am my pager went off for a fully involved structure fire on Terry Road. I was drinking so I did not respond to that fire, so I listened to it via police scanner. It was the very same house that I was stopped at with the stained glass window!! There was no smoke when I was there! The entire family perished in that fire. The cause of the fire was from a spark from a short in an electric blanket. There was a lot of debris under the bed and along with the cord of the blanket when the father turned on the blanket it caused a spark which ignited the debris under the bed which slowly smoldered until it found enough oxygen for the flame. The father was found burned in the bed and the mother and their 3 children were in the living room overcome from smoke inhalation. One 12 year old survived for about 3 days then died. The other 2 kids and mother died at the scene. The really sad part of this story is that the mother was pounding on the window trying to break it to escape (there was blood on the window and her hands and wrists were cut). The kids were right with their mother. Right around the corner the front door was unlocked!! All she had to do was go another 10 feet and escape!! This was an old farmhouse. It did not burn to the ground. The main fire was concentrated in the bedroom where the father died in bed. If the mother knew to drop to her knees and crawl to the door she and her children would be alive today! I cannot stress enough for people to practice fire drills in the home!! Teach your young children to go to the nearest escape route. Plan and drill!! Drill in the middle of the night. Drill often!!! Make sure the children know what to do if they wake up in the middle of the night hearing the smoke alarm!! Change the batteries in your smoke detectors every year!! When you change your clocks would be a good time, I do it every Fall. Please, if you have children, teach them not to run to your room, teach them the safest escape route!! If you have a second story in your house, have portable ladders for the windows. The kind that roll up and you can put right by the window inside. If you go to http://www.google.com type in fire escape ladders in the search box and it comes up with different sites for ladders from $35.00 to $200.00 you don’t need to spend a lot on them, just something you can throw out the window to escape. Something the kids can do by themselves. Drill…drill…drill…I cannot stress enough the importance of fire drills!!
In August of 1985 we lost a woman and her two young children from smoke inhalation. She came home from the bar late at night and dropped her cigarette in some trash in the garage and they were found in the living room. The mother was laying on the couch and her two kids were right next to her like they were trying to wake her up.
Clean up the trash in your house, make sure that there is not a pile of trash under the beds. Practice a drill yourself. The kids will know what to do, will you?
PLEASE PRACTICE FIRE DRILLS!!
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