Went to see the Scorpions tonight at Chastain Park(Atlanta, Georgia, USA) with my oldest niece, she lives 10 minutes away from CP. Show way good and was planning to stay the night with her. Decided to go on home to Macon. About halfway back to Macon around 12:30am she calls and says her house(mothers and fathers) burnt down, nothing left. The house burnt down around 8:00pm but they didn’t call because they knew we were at the concert. The house can be replaced but they lost all of their pictures and videos of when the kids were young. All four walls of my niece Tori’s bedroom walls were covered in pictures from the ceiling to the floor. One of he first hings I did when I went there was to look at Tori’s pictures, from birth to now.
Sorry to hear about your sisters house at least noone was hurt and every one is still healthy.
Lucky your niece was with you, she could have been sleeping in her bedroom during the fire and the circumstances could have been different. You are her angel.
Very Sorry to hear the bad news, but thank God they are all well.
Hopefully they will recover from their physical & emotional loss.
Were they insured, Or?
Best Regards,
George
Thanks guys, yes they were insured. The house was about 15 years old and they just had their deck replaced, brother in law was pressure washing the house and deck today so he could seal the deck. Have no idea what caused the fire. Sister was watching TV and noticed the deck on fire, by the time firefighters got there the house was completely gone.
That’s horrible, you just cannot forsee something like that happening.
A relief that everyone is okay.
How awful for your niece, and her family. One moment you have a home, next moment is it gone. But no-one was injured, thank-God. How almost superhuman loving of her parents not to warn her and you. They realised that a part of her future has to be restored form the ground up and wanted her to have that undisturbed nice moment. She will remember and cherish that moment for the rest of her life. I wish you all much strenght.
Glad your people weren’t hurt. A few of my friends and families houses have burned down and the loss of ‘treasures’ and mementos is saddening. As they get rebuilt get in touch with other friends and family to have them see if they have copies of lost pics or similar pics to help them restart their lives- that is comforting in more ways than one.
BTW I love both the Scorpions and Chastain Park concerts- no concert experience can match the class and closeness of one held there.
Phil
So sorry to hear your family's loss and best wishes for them being able to get back on with life and overcome.
Sounds like it may have been an outdoor electrical box. Maybe got drenched with water from the pressure washer, and shorted out. Seems like it would kick off a circuit breaker though, but who knows. Those electrical boxes are made to withstand rain, not a 2600psi water jet.
I had a house fire once from a TV. The electrical cord to the TV evidently heated up and caught the curtains on fire. Nobody was home at the time. The neighbors called the fire department when they saw flames shooting out of the windows
Really terrible to hear about it, but glad that no one got hurt. All I can do is to wish the best and that they may get back to normal as soon as possible.
Sad news, I hope they have a place to stay until they get past this.
that sounds like the cause. And those breakers don’t always work. How do you set up a two breaker system ?
I don’t know much about electrical work, so I always hire an experienced electrician do anything for me.
Was under the impression outlets attached to the outside of the house were supposed to be GFI outlets so this kind of thing didn’t happen. They are on my house and it was built in 1976.
GFI or GFCI, same thing - ground fault circuit interrupter - protects you against shock if the ground wire or ground rod has broken or been disconnected
Arc fault interrupter — newer technology — will cut power if there’s an electrical arc between hot and neutral, which won’t trigger a GFI.
http://ecmweb.com/forums/electrical-101/national-electrical-code-nec/new-afci-requirements-2014-nec
http://www.combinationafci.com/resources/doc_ieee_combination_afci.pdf
With alternating current, a nail or screw driven through a piece of Romex can go between two wires and be almost close enough to cause an arc, then add dust or water or movement and you get an intermittent arc (and that only when the circuit happens to be switched on). Eventually the intermittent heat melts something or moves something and you get a hotter arc and a fire.
Arc fault interrupters are slowly being added to the code — first it was kitchen circuits, then I think in 2013 they were added to cover bedroom circuits (and not all of them, and your city and state codes don’t have to follow the US national code of course).
It’s worth reading up on them. Most electricians don’t like installing them because the earlier AFIs were even touchier than the earliy GFIs, and in some circuits you do need both of them increasing the annoyance factor of false positives.
Last work I had the electrician flat out lied to me, said the AFIs weren’t being made any longer, that’s why he wasn’t installing them.
Trust but verify. I’m slowly putting them in for all the circuits, inside and out. So I have to check a little more often for a flipped breaker.
Better than a fire.
Breakers are supposed to trip before the current exceeds the wire’s capability to handle it without damaging the wire insulation from heat, however being a mechanical device they do not always work properly. A house of recent vintage should have GFCI outlets or a GFCI breaker along with a water-resistant cover, very new houses should have Arc-Fault breakers to protect against sparking and ‘bubble covers’, but nothing is perfect protection against everything possible. One spark in the wrong place is all it takes with any electrical system.
I don’t want to speculate on the cause of the fire; I can see a dozen ways it could have started which are rather irrelevant at this point. The Fire Department will determine the cause, and hopefully the insurance company will cover all the losses quickly without quibbling over the details.
In the US, the Red Cross will usually get you a hotel room for 1-3 days and nights if your house burns, but only if they have the funds to do that. They usually contact the persons affected on the fire scene- if not you can contact them. They are worthy of our support for we can easily be the next victim of circumstance ourselves.
Phil
My sister and her husband are staying my parents, both children have their own places but a lot of their personal belonging were still at the house, basically took necessities, one in college and the other finished a years or so ago. Just about everything is gone but believe it or not the a lot of the pictures were in a plastic storage tote inside a clothes closet. The fire hoses drenched the clothes over the pictures which then fell onto the tote containing the pictures. Most of the pictures in the tote are good. There were a lot more pictures, the niece I went to the concert with had all four or her bedroom walls covered in pictures, from ceiling to floor. She started doing that from the time she was four or five years old, she’s just turned twenty five. All the home videos were lost except for a few that were duplicated and stored at my parents home for this very reason, should something like this happen.
The things lost that bothers me the most are the three lingerie cabinets that my father made for my sister and two nieces. Sort of like a chest of drawers with two small drawers at the top, two medium in the middle and two big at the bottom. Built using raised panels from wood that we saw milled. One oak, one walnut, and one hickory plus a file cabinet in oak that was made the same way. These were the last pieces of woodworking my father made and he now hates woodworking. He’s almost 78 and has lost all interest in doing much of anything including woodworking so these will not be replaced.
Yes Chastain Park is great and the Scorpions were good also. This was my first time at CP, the only major venue in Atlanta I had never been to. Will now be going there a lot more since it’s only about a 5 to 10 minute ride from the niece.
terrible to hear but glad everybody is ok.
The first LP I bought w/ my paper route money was Animal Magnetism when it first came out in the imports section, that’s how I discovered the Scorps.
Still have it to this day altho I’ve given away most of my LPs and turntable…
Dang all the best for all involved in this stressful times.
Make a emailaddress from google or something and send copys of pasports, insurance papers, deeds, wills and every time a real nice pics jumps out from the rest to that. In a situation like this very valuable
Very sorry about this southland. Prayers go out for your family.
Well that’s just terrible news and I’m sorry to hear it. It sounds like you all have a very close knit family which is nice in times like this.