Is it happening again? I am so scared!

[sweetypie]

I can't handle it! I'm freaking out and don't know what to do!

Basically, here's a back story of my life . . . . two years ago, my fiance's mother lived with us because she was retired. We also had three dogs. My fiance and I left the house for an hour only to return when two people called us and said they had found two of our dogs. We thought they had just escaped from the house again. But when we returned, there were fire trucks and police men and red cross people surrounding our house. It had burned to the ground, somehow in an hour after we left. My fiance's Mom was found dead and so was one of our dogs with her. The two other dogs had escaped. My fiance's Mom had died from smoke inhalation (according to the coroner later who did the autopsy), but the neighbors told us that they had witnessed the dog jump back in the house to save my fiance's Mom and burn to death, so that's how she died.

The fire happened really fast and it burned up so much that the detectives from the fire department said that they don't know officially what the cause was. They are guessing that it was an electrical fire that had been burning, unbeknownst to us, for days inside our walls before our house burned down. They said that a house could only burn down that fast if it had already been smoldering for awhile. It was just really insane for only an hour to pass and someone to go from alive to dead. Our house to smell nothing like smoke and then suddenly to be gone completely. To see pictures on the internet of the twenty foot or so flames that had engulfed our house.

Anyway, fast forward to now. My fire alarm keeps going off for short bursts of time in my house. I smell smoke mildly when it happens, but can see nothing that could be causing it (I've searched the whole house). I'm scared that there's an electrical fire in the walls that we can't see that's going to trap all of us (including my two surviving dogs) and kill all of us suddenly like my fiance's Mom and our one dog was killed. I don't want to die and even worse, I can't handle the idea of losing more people in my life to fire. I couldn't leave the house for months after the first fire out of fear that I would leave and come home to find a freak accident again and more people I loved gone.

I was trying to sleep, but the alarm went off and woke all of us up again. I'm freaking out. What do I do?

[Lee Grant Irons]

sweetypie,

I am so sorry you are going through this. It is completely reasonable for you to be concerned and even frightened by this. Your fear is a normal response to feeling like you can't stop something bad from happening. So let me see if I can help you think through this. It always helps me to write down what I am thinking, so I can review it and adjust it to get a more clear picture. So grab a paper and a pencil.

First, I think the main problem here is not that the fire alarm is going off, but that you don't feel safe in your house. So let's see what can be done about that.

Second, write down your goal, which I think is that you want to feel safe and secure in your home again.

Third, write down the things that you can't change. You can't change that your mother-in-law and one of your dogs died. You also can't change that life sometimes is random and unfair, and some things can't be prevented from happening.

Fourth, write down what you know. There are some things you can do to mitigate the chance of some random bad event happening or mitigate the consequences if something bad does happen. You know that your fire alarm is going off. You also know that the investigators said they thought your last fire was a result of electrical smoldering.

Fifth, this gets us to thinking about what we can now do with this knowledge. If you have people living around you who use fireplaces, ensure your windows are closed and your own fireplace flu is closed to prevent smoke from coming into your house. You also might need to replace the weather stripping around your doors to prevent smoky air from coming into the house. Another thing you can do is replace the smoke alarm to see if it is simply a malfunctioning alarm. Another thing you can do is hire an electrician to check your electrical systems. It could be that there are power spikes or noise coming through the system that is setting off your smoke alarm. An electrician could detect this and install a noise filter to stop the problem. An electrician could also detect if electrical current is being drawn though any of your switches in your switch box even when everything is turned off downstream of that switch. If so, then the electrician has tools to find where the problem is, which you can then have fixed.

While you are working on all of this, you can also work on better preparing your family for escape from a fire. There are lots of resources online that can teach you how to do this.

Try the above things. By doing something about it, you will feel more empowered and less helpless. If the problem persists, then you will at least have eliminated the most likely sources of the problem. Then comes the more challenging part of looking for the less obvious possibilities.

Let us know how it goes.