Clean laundry starts fire
A basket of warm washing is to blame for a fire that has temporarily closed a Taranaki cafe.
Lepperton’s Tawa Glen Cafe closed its doors after it was the victim of a fire, which started in a basket of clean, dry washing, on Wednesday afternoon.
The washing, which contained the cafe’s tea towels and cleaning rags, had been washed, dried in a tumble dryer and placed on a table in the middle of the building.
Quinten Pratt, one of the owners of the family-owned cafe, said staff had done nothing different with the washing than any other day.
‘‘We’ve been doing it for the last three years – putting it on the table at three o’clock each day ready to be folded the next day,’’ Pratt said. ‘‘This time it happened to self-combust.
‘‘It’s just one of those things that happen.’’
Pratt said the cafe’s security alarm went off and the company phoned him to let him know around 6.30pm so he went on his phone to check the footage.
‘‘As soon as I checked the camera I saw a fire in the middle of the cafe,’’ he said.
Pratt phoned the fire service and drove straight to the cafe, clueless as to how the fire started.
Firefighters from Waitara and Inglewood extinguished the blaze, which luckily only left smoke damage and burnt a table and chair.
The crews told Pratt the fire started in the pile of washing that had come out of the tumble dryer and that it was quite a common thing.
‘‘I was stunned that a clothes basket full of things could start a fire.’’
Specialist Fire Investigator Andrew Cotter said it was so common he wasn’t often alerted to such fires because firefighters could easily identify the cause.
Cotter said fires often occurred when clothes that had been soaked in oil – kitchen, motor or even massage oils – were then put through the tumble dryer.
‘‘Oil is one of those things that can act as a fuel,’’ he said.
‘‘It gets hot in the middle and can just happen.’’
He said it was just one of those things that could occur and often happened with overalls.
The cafe will reopen in the next two or three weeks after it has been repainted.