Winiata’s Blog

Walking through a house which has been destroyed by fire is really weird. The public tours went from 10 o’clock until 2o’clock. At 3 o’clock, all the fire-fighters in town gathered for the next event. They were going to burn down the remainder of the building. All the fire trucks were parked along the road (which, by the way, was closed), and they tested the hoses. There were cones and barrier tape marking where the public boundaries.

There was a big crowd of people sitting across the road from the house. We all had our cameras out ready to see the action.  Shortly after, a fire-fighter went inside to the owner’s bedroom. About a minute later, we could see flames leaping up, through the bedroom window. Two minutes later, the window exploded. Soon part of the roof was on fire. I looked in the hollow gap where the window had once been, and the room was completely full of flames. That was when my camera and I went crazy.  

Ten minutes later I heard from the crowd a gasp of shock as the bedroom roof collapsed. The bedroom door had incinerated, letting the fire spread into the rest of the house. Suddenly, big clouds of strange yellow smoke appeared above the house. It was the insulation in the roof which made the yellow smoke (Bradford gold batts). What really amazed me was how hot it was. The corrugated iron up the roof was melting so fast that I could feel the heat from across the road, and it felt hotter than the sun.  There was a big tree at the front of the house. At the beginning it was all green and growing ok. While the house was burning, all the leaves were turning brown and shrivelling.  The firemen were hosing the neighbour’s houses, and also the lawn and the tree. Luckily the tree was saved from catching fire, but I don’t know if it is still alive. 

My favourite part was probably the chimney collapsing. While the house was crumbling room by room, the chimney was still standing. Eventually, it finally began to give way. But this was different because it was falling just a little at a time. The excitement of the crowd was growing every time it fell because we all wanted to see what would happen when it finally flopped.Another highlight was the smoke which was billowing out into the sky. Sometimes it was white, black, yellow and grey. When the roof had fully collapsed, there was a big burst of black and yellow smoke. When I got home afterwards, I could still see the smoke from my house.  I can’t wait to go back and see what it looks like now.

This is my third weekly diary (which is the latest you could get). Yesterday, after we had picked up our Makuhari student, we went to view a house which was in the newspaper. A man called Grant lost his house in a fire 6 months ago, but the house didn’t burn all the way down. It had happened at 2 o’clock in the morning (the day it was damaged of course!). Grant was the only person in the house at the time, and if his dog hadn’t woken him up, he wouldn’t have survived.  There were some firemen waiting outside the house, and they took us in for a tour. They told us that the fire started when a laptop was left on the carpet. It was over-heating and it ignited. It travelled along the carpet and burned the couch, which just happened to contain the equivalent of 30 litres of fuel. On the wall was what remained of a flat screen plasma TV. IT was just a piece of rusted metal hanging on the wall. The fire-fighters showed us how dangerous it is to leave electronics plugged into the wall at night. The kitchen was a mess and the fridge freezer had melted and shrunk. There was a tap going in the sink but the tap handle had burned so bad it was melted and couldn’t be turned off. I went into a room where the door had been shut, and the room had suffered hardly any damage. As I walked around inside, I looked up at the roof. It was completely hollow and I could see all the wires that used to power the lights. I could see what was inside the walls, and in some places, you could just make out the wallpaper which was surrounded by flame marks. There were signs on the walls which stated the things that happened there, for example: one said ‘this room reached up to 400 degrees Celsius’, and another said ‘the smoke level was down to here’, which was about 30cm above the floor.  It must have been really sad for the owner to stand helplessly outside and watch all his belongings explode into flames.