City man wakes to fire, saves others in block
Plates in a charred drying rack and melted carpets are a reminder of how close seven residents came to perishing in a residential Hamilton fire.
The tenants were asleep in their threestoreyed central city apartment on July 14, when one of them heard a popping sound at 3.20am.
Specialist fire investigator Kevin Holmes said the man whose bedroom was on the ground floor, decided to investigate the noise.
‘‘He’s opened the door and there has been smoke on the ground level. So he’s had to go up the first flight of stairs to the next level, and woken up the occupant, and then he’s had to go past the fire in the lounge and up the next set of stairs to wake the two people up on the top.
‘‘Then they’ve come down the stairs past the fire again, through the smoke and back down and everybody has thankfully made it out safely.’’
Holmes said the concern is that the smoke alarms which had been installed in the rental had been removed.
‘‘After the last property inspection at the end of March there were five new smoke alarms put in there. There was no evidence of any smoke alarms in there at the time of the fire, and certainly nobody in the apartment was warned of the fire by a smoke alarm being activated.’’
The fire could have been fatal had the occupant on the ground floor not woken up when he did to the noise and gone to investigate.
‘‘It could have been a different story certainly for the two people living on the top floor, they probably would have struggled to get through to a place of safety through the lounge where the developing fire was.’’
Holmes confirmed the first started on the second level in the lounge room, at this stage he thinks it’s from discarded smoking material. There is nothing suspicious about the fire.
He said smoke alarms are your voice when you are asleep.
‘‘Our biggest concern is the removal of the smoke alarms – they are there for a reason – when you are asleep you have no sense of smell so you are potentially not going to smell smoke.
‘‘A fire when it first starts can be very quiet so you aren’t necessarily going to hear it. And it can easily smoke log a room very quickly and it’s smoke that kills people in fire situations before the flames do.’’
It’s also important that you have an escape plan as you only have three minutes before a house fire becomes unsurvivable.
Holmes wants people to leave the smoke alarms in their homes.
‘‘If you are renting it’s your landlord’s obligation to put them there which is what happened on this occasion the landlord fulfilled their obligation to put the smoke alarms in under the residential tenancy act, but unfortunately they were taken down for what reason we don’t know.’’
He has said there has been a drop-off in the number of house fires this winter.
‘‘We are not sure if that is because it’s been a little warmer than normal. We would like to think it’s because people are more aware of some of the dangers and there are safer practices around fire.’’