COMMENTARY
Bruce Andriatch: House fires are crying out for vigilance
The thing about fire is there’s no reasoning with it. It doesn’t care if there are people in the house. It doesn’t care if all the presents are under the tree ready for the kids to unwrap. It doesn’t care if you have only one month to go until the mortgage is paid.
And at the risk of debunking one of the great cliches about Western New York life, it also doesn’t care if you live outside the City of Buffalo.
This has been a bad couple of months for suburban house fires. It’s not just that there has been a rash of them, but that they have been particularly devastating on one or more levels.
The most recent one was Thursday in the City of Tonawanda, when a fire in a Stark Street home killed a woman who lived there and destroyed the house. Investigators are still trying to determine what caused that blaze.
A day earlier, a resident of Bellingham Drive in south Amherst apparently left one of her stove burners on and left the house to go to work. By the time firefighters got the blaze under control, it had claimed the lives of the woman’s four beloved dogs.
Two weeks before that, Marilla Supervisor George Gertz, who is also assistant chief in the town’s Fire Department, suffered serious burns to his hands, arms, ears and head after responding to a house fire on Eldridge Road.
And in November, a house on Strickler Road in Clarence incurred $160,000 damage during a fire. Investigators determined that the blaze had been sparked in a chimney by a squirrel that had built a nest.
The roll call could have been even worse if not for the quick thinking of retired Angola Police Officer Kenneth Sunday, who on Dec. 16 was walking past a house on Long Beach Lane in Evans and smelled smoke. Rather than waiting for the Fire Department, Sunday first knocked on the door and then kicked it in, possibly saving the lives of two people who were inside.
But even in that case, the happy ending of heroic action preventing injuries or death doesn’t change the lasting effects of a home being destroyed.
Fire is not more or less devastating than other catastrophes. And it can truly be an accident. But like so many tragedies, its greatest ally is apathy: the carelessly tossed cigarette, the smoke detectors missing a battery, the faulty wiring that needs to be replaced.
Tom Merrill, chief of the Snyder Fire Department and vice president of the Amherst Chiefs Association, said he and his fellow volunteers see far too many preventable fires. That’s why when the department responds to a call for a non-fire emergency, firefighters who are not dealing directly with the emergency use the opportunity to check smoke detectors.
“You would not believe how many times we run into smoke detectors that don’t work or there’s no smoke detectors at all,” he said.
Tom Olshanski, spokesman for the U. S. Fire Administration, said that when investigators look back at a fire, there is almost always a moment where the fire could have been prevented.
“It’s just people paying attention to what’s happening in their environment and what the homes and buildings are trying to tell them,” he said, adding: “It’s about being vigilant.”
During the 10-year-period from 1998 through 2007, according to the Fire Administration, there was a drop in the number of fires and the resulting toll of deaths and injuries.
This suggests that while fire doesn’t listen to reason, some people are getting the message.
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