Fire!

This afternoon we extinguished a fire.

The carpenters worked today to finish the roof structure. The horizontal lattice is now ready for the thatch. They left around 3 o'clock. I spent most of the afternoon in the bedroom trying to get India to sleep. She had been running abound for two hours at Denym's birthday party but did not fall asleep easily. She finally fell asleep closer to four than three o'clock. After four o'clock Matias opened the door to the bedroom. I smelled wood smoke. Matias ran to kitchen and I followed the scent outside the front door.

The fire must have had been burning low for hours in the dry blocks of wood that were at the end of the house close to the pool. There had been an old willow tree at the border that came down in a winter storm before we bought the house. Matias and I started pouring water in bucket fulls onto the embers. There were large stones among the wood. They were so hot that most of the water turned immediately to steam. Also, there was a couple of centimeters thick electrical cable that had been providing electricity to the basement. It had burned through. We had lost power from all wall socket at 15:25 (according to my laptop's logs). I can not understand why that cable runs most of the way around the house attached to the outside wall. I should have gone straight through the wall at the back of the house or been dug into the wall under plaster.

After the fire was extinguished, I found it hard to decide what to do next. A shock was settling in. Anything could have happened. What could have lit the fire? A carpenter's cigarette butt thrown carelesssly down? A spark from a chain saw hitting a nail?

I wrote down what had happened for about 20 minuted before phoning the thatching company foremen. He informed the others and got me an electrician on site within an hour. He isolated the damaged cable and switched on the automatic fuses. He will finish the job on Monday.

18:15 situation was back to normal. It took me a bit longer than that to relax.

Incidentally, the kitchen has a bit of an unreal atmosphere. Today has not been too hot and there is a fresh southerly wind. Kitchen is in the shade and the wind blows through the over a meter and a half diameter hole in the ceiling cooling it. Light, large-flaked snow falls steadily down the hole giving a strangely Northern hemisphere Christmasy feeling. Only that the snow is saw dust.