Community rallies around family
Couple and five children forced out of home after $300,000 blaze
Ben Faulds was alone at home and sleeping after an overnight shift at Swish when he awoke to find his house on Prince Street filled with smoke.
It was about 11 a.m. on Thursday, and his common-law partner Ashley Macduff was out with the children (they have a blended family of five kids ranging in age from nine to 13).
Macduff says the two smoke alarms weren’t working; they’d both begun to malfunction the day prior, and the couple had taken note and planned to replace the units.
She also said Faulds woke up because of the smell of the smoke — and he escaped because their ground-floor master bedroom has an exterior door.
“He was lucky he was in the room he was in — we got very, very lucky,” Macduff said Monday.
Macduff had a day off from her job as a personal support worker at Fairhaven long-term-care home on New Year’s Eve and was on her way to the mall with her children when she got a call from Faulds about the fire.
She rushed back to discover that Faulds had escaped unharmed, but the family pets were still inside.
Firefighters had to warn Macduff not to try to
go get them out of the house herself; instead they went in and found the two Boston terriers, Everly and Charm.
Resuscitation efforts were successful only with Charm, who the family is now calling Lucky Charm.
“She ended up living up to her name,” Macduff said, adding that her family is deeply grateful to the firefighters for saving Charm.
She added that her three sons live with a condition affecting their speech, and derived therapy from their bond with the dogs.
Meanwhile four cats also died in the fire — two belonging to the family, plus two more they were cat-sitting for a friend.
Now the family is living with Macduff’s mother in the city’s south end, and they’re looking for a four-bedroom house to rent.
Macduff says they have house insurance; the damage estimate was $300,000 and it’s still unclear what started the fire.
Damage to the house’s main beam was so extensive that the house is now structurally unsound, Macduff said.
Assessments still need to be done to the house to determine whether the house can be repaired or needs to be razed and rebuilt, she added.
Three Go Fund Me campaigns have been launched; one of her co-workers started one, a family friend started another and a neighbour started the third.
Together, the three campaigns had raised a total of about $7,100 by Monday night.
One of the campaigns is online at bit.ly/2X8gEBF.