Water makes Fire

I heard an interesting story today that I thought may be interesting to home owners out there!

5 years ago an acquaintance went through an experience where her home caught on fire. As fate would have it, the family, that usually travels on weekends during the summer, decided to stay home and take advantage of the good weather locally.  On a Saturday evening she walked in the house for a refill and smelt an odd smell.  She said specifically that it did not smell of smoke but she knew that something was horribly wrong.  She then went outside to inform her husband and to have him come help her look for the source of the odd smell.  Sure enough as they walked towards the garage they noticed the smell growing in intensity.  They opened their door and found the whole thing on fire.  They summoned their son who happened to have a fire extinguisher on his rig and opened the garage door to give him access to the flames as they crawled up the walls and across the ceiling heading towards the main house.  He successfully killed the fire and being much braver than the author of this story(me) their son decided to climb into the attic to make sure the fire hadn't made it up there, which fortunately it had not.  They decided to call the fire department to come and ensure the fire was not continuing to burn on inside the walls(which can happen). In the end the damage was contained to just the garage but it could have been seriously worse.

After the damage, they also found that the smoke was almost the worst part as the stench had gotten into a variety of different parts of the house.  Fortunately they were related to someone in the restoration industry who knew how to adequately handle the damage but it still meant they had to stay in a hotel for a few nights because of the smell.

The kicker is that this whole thing started with a water heater.  What they found was that the wood crate that many water heaters sit on had slowly caught on fire from their defective water heater that was dropping scalding hot water onto it and slowly overtime caught on fire

MORAL?  take a moment to check out the water heater at your house, it could be the difference between thousands of dollars of damage, getting the temporary boot from your home and making sure your home and children are safe as we head into the summer!