Flames gut teen’s bedroom cabin
Student has nothing but school uniform she was wearing
AWhanga¯rei teenager has nothing left but the school uniform she was wearing when a fire wrecked her cabin on her family’s Puwera property near Portland this week.
Shakyla Selwyn, 13, had been home for less than 15 minutes when a fire believed to be started by an electrical fault with a charger sparked a blaze inside the cabin — the teen’s bedroom — and destroyed the sleepout plus a carport and three sheds on Tuesday around 4.15pm.
Her mother, Moana Selwyn, said the experience had been devastating, “to say the least”. “She is struggling because she was the only one there who saw her bed and bedside table engulfed in flames. It destroyed her entire life in her cabin.”
Crews from Whanga¯rei, Hikurangi, Maungakaramea, Onerahi and Portland responded to the blaze around 200m south of the State Highway 1/ Portland Rd junction. Firefighters remained at the scene until 8pm.
Selwyn said Shakyla had put her school bag in the cabin and started washing dishes in the house when she smelled smoke in the air.
“She turned around and saw smoke coming in the front door.”
Selwyn was down the hallway getting clothes out of the washing machine when she heard Shakyla screaming from outside that the cabin was on fire.
Her 1-year-old baby, the youngest of her four children, was asleep in the house when the fire started.
Selwyn grabbed a hose to try to douse the flames but no water came out because of a burst water main near SH1.
“Instead we had to stand there and watch it unfold,” Selwyn said. “The wind direction blew the fire into the shed next to the cabin — destroyed that. Then it moved on to the carport and then the next lot of sheds.”
The buildings housed children’s bikes, racing equipment, tools, paints, lawnmowers and car parts.
But some luck was on the family’s side — two gas bottles used for the home near the fire miraculously did not explode, Selwyn said.
“One of them was full and the other was a quarter full. With the heat and damage being done around the bottles no one could figure out how they didn’t go off.”
Neighbours had rushed across the paddocks with fire extinguishers to help while others took Selwyn’s three other children away to shield them from the distressing scene.
The family could not stay at the property because it had minor smoke damage and no power or hot water because the fire destroyed power lines nearby.
Selwyn said the family had been inundated with acts of kindness from the community after news of the fire.
People had donated clothes and blankets to Shakyla.
A woman moving house the afternoon of the fire provided dinner for the family that evening after spotting the blaze from SH1.
“It has blown us away how much support and help we’ve been given within Whanga¯rei,” Selwyn said. “We are so, so grateful to everyone who has offered us help.”
A Givealittle page has been set up to help the family as the house was insured but the contents were not.