Renovation Hazards

A garage on fire five houses away.  This could have been MY garage!

A disturbing episode happened last night.  A neighbor came to the door to say that there was a fire in my driveway, did I know about it?  I was shocked, and rushed out to see that the construction debris, accumulated in a dumpster and in my  driveway from the window replacement and renovation demolition, was blazing and spreading in the brisk wind.

I ran back to the house to fetch a fire extinguisher and blasted it on the fire.  Five seconds later, the extinguisher was exhausted, but the fire was merely diminished.  The neighbor brought another extinguisher, and another 5-second blast brought the fire down to glowing embers.  Still not out, so buckets of water were filled and applied.

Meanwhile, looking down the alley, a blaze had erupted from a garage a few houses away.  Fire sirens had sounded earlier, but seemed to have gone elsewhere.  I called 911 to report the garage fire.  The flames went high, licking the power lines and trees, and it seemed forever before the firetrucks arrived.

Today, I see that the garage down the alley was burned to the ground.  There were construction materials nearby, a stack of scorched trusses suggested that the garage was being repaired or replaced.  Could it be that someone was cruising the alley, torching anything that looked like construction debris?  I didn’t really expect that this would be one of the hazards of renovation.

Oh, and one more lesson:  those home fire extinguishers may be good for small kitchen grease fires, but they just didn’t match my hollywood-derived expectation of how they would work in this situation.  I guess it is unreasonable to expect them to quench a garage fire, but I really thought there was more in them than I saw.  I will be replacing my spent fire extinguisher (and my neighbor’s) with one that has a higher capacity.