Don't Forget About Fire Safety By Katherine Salant
You think it will never happen to you until it happens. Washington, D.C., homebuilder Tom Bozzuto woke up on a Saturday morning last July, ready to start his usual weekend routine when he looked out the window and saw that the entire side of his house was on fire.
Bozzuto quickly roused his wife and dogs and got them out of the house. In a state of disbelief, he searched for the phone -- a portable that wasn't where it was supposed to be. Then he found his cell phone and called the fire department. His neighbor had already seen the fire and called them as had his security alarm company.
Watching his house burn before his eyes, Bozzuto grabbed the fire extinguisher in his kitchen, but it was woefully inadequate to the blaze outside. As he contemplated getting a bigger one from the basement, the windows in the kitchen broke, and he was facing an advancing wall of thick, black smoke. Before he made a quick exit, he had the presence of mind to take his car keys so that he could move his cars out of the driveway to make way for the fire trucks.
In the one and a half hours it took for the fire department to put out the blaze, Bozzuto and his wife reconstructed how the fire started and how it went on for so long before they became aware of it.
The night before, they sat on their rear deck to enjoy a rare, pleasant July evening and a nice break from Washington's notorious summertime humidity. As Bozzuto was getting a couple of drinks, his wife Barbara lit two candles that sat on a dish inside a wicker basket. The candles were old and their flame so low, he didn't notice them. After his wife went to bed, he stayed up reading and smoking a cigar, which he carefully extinguished in a bucket. Not realizing that the candles were lit, he didn't put them out.
Eventually the candles burned down. The wicker basket they sat in caught fire; sparks then ignited several other wicker baskets on the deck. These in turn ignited the redwood siding on the house. Because the Bozzutos' modern Frank Lloyd Wright-styled house had huge windows of tempered glass, the heat of the fire did not cause them to crack. No smoke entered the house, so the smoke alarms did not go off.
Bozzuto and his wife are now rebuilding and refurnishing. It is not the house building project that either ever imagined they would be undertaking. They are not locked into a fire-proof-at-any-price mentality, but the fire did influence a few of their decisions. Their rebuilt house will have sprinklers. Their bedroom will have a window that is large enough to make a quick exit should the need ever arise. Their balcony off the bedroom will feature a fold-up ladder that can be opened for a quick exit off the other side of the house if need be (they had purchased it for their old house but had never gotten around to installing it).
Beyond these basics, however, Bozzuto said he and his wife were carefully picking and choosing as they would with any new house, considering their lifestyle and adding needed space for household activities, in this case an exercise room and a fourth bedroom for visiting children and future grandchildren.
Nonetheless, as Bozzuto can attest, the unimaginable really does happen and he offered this advice to homeowners:
1. Make sure that an emergency vehicle can find your house. In Bozzuto's case, his house number was a cute little sign on a tree and the fire department trucks did not have a global positioning satellite receiver, otherwise known as a GPS. These make finding an address much easier because you type in an address and it gives directions. It took the fire department twenty minutes to find his house; precious time was lost, and the fire damage that much greater.
2. When you buy a homeowner's policy for fire protection, you will almost certainly be offered coverage for your household contents. The quick rule of thumb that most people use is "the replacement value of your contents should be about fifty percent of the replacement value of your house," but Bozzuto said this won't be enough. His insurance company gave them one hundred percent of what they told their insurance company their household contents were worth, but this turned out to be about fifty percent less than their true value. His wife's jewelry was insured separately, but they never thought to insure each one of their extensive collection of paintings and prints. Nor did they ever think about the replacement cost when they purchased shoes and other clothing items. "Go and look at your own closet and start adding up all the money you spent for everything in it. You'll be surprised," he said.
3. Unless you marry someone with a near photographic memory, you should film your contents (Bozzuto did not but he had the good fortune to marry someone with terrific recall). You own many more belongings than you realize -- his wife typed up 47 pages of household inventory items.
4. When you have a fire and smoke spreads rapidly, you will have people approaching you very soon afterwards to clean your stuff. Think twice before you give them anything. In a dazed state, the Bozzutos sent off large quantities of clothing that weren't salvageable. Moreover, at least one-half of the clothing were items that they no longer wore -- like his old army uniform -- , but had kept for sentimental reasons. Bozzuto said the smell of smoke is "pervasive" and the chemicals used to clean the clothes could not remove it. None of the fabric-covered furniture was salvageable either, despite the cleaning service's best efforts, so the Bozzutos had to throw all of it away.
5. Many people think insurance companies are adverswhen resolving claims, but the Bozzutos' insurance company was not adversat all. The firm didn't argue with $40 or $50 for a silk tie or $39 for an iron. Where he had problems was with his art collection. The insurance company understandably wanted documentation for $1,300 paintings by lesser-known Washington area artists. If you have anything unusual, document its value.
6. Have your house rebuilt by a firm that specializes in fire restoration. Though Bozzuto is a builder himself, his firm does not have the experience to tackle a job of this specialized nature.
As they go about rebuilding, Bozzuto has remained resolutely philosophical. "When all of your possessions are destroyed, you can't quickly replace what it took you 30 years to accumulate. You happened to see a painting you liked a lot. It captured your heart so you bought it. You bought a book you saw reviewed -- you lived with it for a month. You don't just lose your possessions, you lose memories, and that's tough. But you get caught up in the day to day minutiae of things like 'can I get a sweater I like as much as the one I lost?' that help you get through this."
. Questions of a Do It Yourself nature should be submitted to our "