Electrical Fire

This is my sixth year in the rental property business. With several dozen rentals, I've had just about every bad thing occur that is possible. However, this morning I received the call that I've always dreaded. It was a call that one of my buildings (a duplex) was on fire.

Before I get too far into the story, let me back up a little bit. I keep my cellphone with me 24/7. I use my cellphone for all my business activities, including dealing with tenants. In the past 5+ years, I've never received one of the stereotypical "3am broken water line" calls that you always hear about. Nevertheless, I always keep it on just in case. Last night was no exception. When I went to bed, I put the phone on the headboard. At about 5am, my &%$#@ cellphone started chirping that the battery was almost dead. I was tired and it was nearly morning, so I shut it off instead of getting up to put it on charge. When I finally got up about 7am, I plugged my phone in and turned it on. I immediately had two voicemails, which I knew was a bad sign. Sure enough, as the first voicemail began, I could hear sirens in the background. The call was from one of my tenants who was telling me that the duplex was on fire. That voicemail was received at 5:50 am, a full one hour and ten minutes before I plugged the phone in. As I started to listen to the second voice mail, I had a call waiting, which was the tenant. She told me that the fire had started in the downstairs apartment and that the fire was out. I told her that I would be right there. It was quite ironic that I received the dreaded 5 am call on just about the only occassion that my phone has been off in the past 6 years!

About 10 minutes later, I arrived at the house. There was still a fire engine in the middle of the street with the emergency lights flashing. As it turned out, I knew the fire captain that was on the scene and he took me into the apartment to show me the cause of the fire.

I had been using this one-bedroom apartment for storage. There were a lot of tools and supplies still in there, even though I had been slowly transferring my stuff to the storeroom at the pink elephant, which I will be using as a central location for all my rental stuff. Because it was being used for storage, there was nothing actually being electrically powered in the apartment, even though the electric service was on. Even more strange is that an electrical fire would occur in a duplex that had a brand new electrical service and all modern (or new) electrical wiring. Anyway, the fire captain took me to the bathroom to show me where the fire started. The fire started in an electric wall mounted heater that had not been used in the 4 years that I have owned the property. We installed a new electric furnace and heat pump for the unit and I was planning to remove the electric heater when we renovated the unit. There was little doubt that the heater was the cause of the fire. The walls in the bathroom were completely charred, with the worst charring immediately surrounding the heater. The only other electrical appliance in the unit was the light, which was on the opposite wall and showed no evidence of significant damage (other than smoke damage). I have a lot of experience with electrical work, and I can tell you that I have absolutely no idea how a heater that wasn't turned on and hasn't been used in several years, could suddenly burst into flames. I suppose that it's possible a mouse was chewing on the wiring, but beyond that, I don't have a good idea. I thought that maybe someone had broken into the apartment and caused the fire, but the fire captain said that all the windows and doors were closed and locked when they arrived. They broke in the back door to gain access to the unit.

The bottom line is that the bathroom walls were charred; the kitchen has a lot of smoke damage; and the rest of the apartment has light to moderate smoke damage. I'll need to remove the drywall in the bathroom. The rest of the apartment will need to be cleaned and then painted with Kilz.

While all this may sound bad, I am actually very glad that it turned out so well. The safety equipment worked perfectly in the upstairs apartment. The smoke alarm woke up the tenants and no one was injured. There wasn't even any smoke damage in the upstairs apartment. So, all in all, things could have been a LOT worse.

Lessons learned? Be sure that there are smoke detectors on every floor of every unit (there were) and, of course, keep your cell phone charged.