re: Somebody was watching over us today

May 3 2010 I had just gone to bed when I was awakened to what sounded like a 300 mag going off in the house. Burglar alarm going off. Every kids toy in our bedroom literally went crazy on their own (lights and such).

So I jump up in boxers only and try to turn the alarm off. Won't turn off. In fact the buttons do nothing. Alarm company calls and says all of our windows and doors are showing as opened. But they were all closed. Kids still in bed, wife runs upstairs to check windows and doors up there. All is closed/intact but she comes running down crying that she smells smoke upstairs. She starts to try to call 911. Alarm is loud as hell in the house.

I go in the garage and it smells like burnt wires in there. I quickly decide to turn off mains in the panels. Generator cranks up. shite! I try to manually open garage door to get to generator. It's stuck because when the mechanism fried it put a bind on the chain track and its just too much to overpower with a pull cord. I kill all generator breakers and grab a flashlight to go upstairs. At the same time alarm company calls and says the attic heat detectors are registering. They say FD is being called.

I get upstairs and smell a little smoke. So I open attic stairs and go on up. In the high attic I didn't see anything. But through the gap under the roof that extends over the low attic (over master bedroom) I can see a orange glow. I make my way across the ceiling joists and took a bad step and go through ceiling with 1 leg, hi-centering on a 2x12. Adrenaline pumping, I pull myself up and get to the edge and see my lower attic on fire! Looked like a scene from a movie.

I'm running back across joists to get to the attic scuttle thinking how I'm going to save the "ship". I yell at wife to get kids and get out (fire is buring in attic right over them in our bed)! I fly down the attic stairs and main stair case thinking about where fire extinguishers are. I grab 2 extinguishers out of the kitchen and run back up the stairs and feel the door to the low attic. It's not hot. I'm thinking about how I can get the garden hose by the front doors up there if the fire extinguishers don't work... I open the door and enter the attic. I see there are about 10 different fires buring. I start unloading extinguishers on the fires and to my amazement it's working!!!

Fires are all out but still smoldering. I unload the 2nd extinguisher on smolder and across wall that was burning up to the roof and into subfloor where biggest fire was. It's quiet now and I hear what sounds like an attic vent fan running. I think to myself how can that be, I turned all main power off.

I start to realize it wouldn't be a bad idea to get the fire extinguishers out of the boat and check more things out. Adrenaline still pumping, I fly downstairs and into the garage and think quickly how it might be a wise play to turn the gas off which will kill the generator and just be an all around good idea. I grab a wrench and shut valve at the meter. Right about then a sheriff deputy pulls up and jumps out his car. I yell at him to grab his fire extinguisher and follow me (remember, I'm in my underwear)... But he catches up to me upstairs in the low attic and the vent fan sound is gone... and now finally 18 minutes after they made the call a fire unit (just a deputy chief) shows up. He's pissed because he beat the fire fighters to the call. But I summon him to the attic and start trying to explain what was going on and where. I think I was making sense. I notice finally all the flexible gas lines in the areas that were buring. And realize that vent fan sound was gas escaping through holes in the gas lines after I had extinguished the flames.

Firefighters show up finally 22 minutes after call and I start to come off my adrenaline high and the worst dry mouth and case of shakes sets in as well as the pain in my leg and nads really revs up.

FD goes through house with thermal imaging and looks for hot spots. All is good. They suck most of the smoke out with a big arse fan.

Apparently what happened was the lightning hit the gas meter or stub outs for BBQ and whatnot and travelled across gas line and arced onto any electrical (mostly alarm wiring) that was within 5-6" of the gas line buring holes in the flexible stainless steel gas pipe and igniting a nice size gas driven plume at each spot. The alarm system was absolutely melted. Serveral appliances and such died soon after. External hard drives that were totally unhooked from power and computers were ruined. Laptops all dead. Phones dead. Cable dead. You name it. Even the dishwasher died 4 weeks later. But the alarm took weeks and weeks to be fixed.

6 days with no power in the house while electrician got all the damage sorted out so we could get power back on. It coulda been a lot worse. In the attic the roof sheeting has spots where arcs literally burned through. Crazy.

Thoughts... Now I keep unecessary gas lines shut off at the distribution block. I still may get rid of the flexible gas pipe and go black iron. We've made some bonding and grounding changes around the house and attic. I keep 5lb and 10lb fire extinguishers all over the house and in attic (12 total). I turn gas off when we go on vacation and such. If we hadn't been home it would have burned to the ground. Had I played it safe and waited on FD the damage would have been way worse. The flames were to the roof and once that caught it would have spread quick. Spray foam insulation in walls and ceiling is fire retardant. It slowed the fires progress down tremendously.

Dealing with insurance was an absolute pain. The 1st thing they told my wife was that they were going to investigate for arson. If never heard her talk to another human the way I heard her on that call. Luckily they dropped the whole arson idea at that juncture. But it still took months to get any money out of them. Fortunately I keep a rainy day fund for this purpose so we got shite taken care of.