Tenants ‘lucky to be alive’ after clothes catch fire

0
1831

Two Hardy St East renters are lucky to be alive after a fire started in the lounge of their two storey house last night.

Firefighters were alerted to the property by a 111 call at around 10.30 last night after the tenants, who were watching TV upstairs, smelled smoke coming from the downstairs room.

“All the clothes, and paper and kindling and firewood were all stacked around a freestanding fireplace and had caught on fire,” says senior station officer Craig Davies. “There was also a clothesline strung across the top of the fireplace which had failed and clothes had dropped onto the fireplace and caught on fire.”

Craig says if the occupants had not been awake then the outcome could have been a lot worse as the property was not fitted with smoke alarms. The only exit from upstairs was a single staircase which would have been blocked if the fire spread further.

“If they hadn’t smelled the smoke, if they had been asleep, then they would have quite probably died.”

The tenants managed to extinguish the fire themselves using buckets of water and firefighters dampened down hot spots with hoses and the use of thermal imaging cameras.

The lower ceiling and a corner of the lounge has received significant damage.

“The key here is to keep all the combustibles away from the fireplace and to have working smoke alarms. 80 per cent of the fires we go to don’t have working smoke alarms,” Craig says. “We have a rule that any combustible material must be stacked at least a metre away from a fireplace.”