Fire delivers scary lesson
Papakura Courier
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It’s a wake-up call no one wants but Kim Kuiper is thanking his lucky stars a smoke alarm alerted him to an early-morning fire in his Papakura home.
Mr Kuiper had just installed the alarm after a TV advertisement asked him to "get off the couch" and check the old ones.
After finding them faulty he upgraded to photoelectric alarms that can be more effective and give more time to escape a fire.
"It was particularly cold that morning so I flicked the heater on and went back to bed. About 10 or 15 minutes later the alarm went off," says Mr Kuiper, a dog hand-ler with the Auckland police.
"I didn’t think it was a fire, just that it was faulty, but as soon as I jumped up I could smell plastic burning and thought: ‘This is not good’."
He saw "some reasonable flames" rising from the heater and up the living room wall, woke his daughter Caitlin, 8, and told her to run next door with her fox terrier Riddick.
"When I got back with the extinguisher in only 30 seconds the flames were at the top of the door.
"It was quite impressive how high it could get in such a short time – and pretty scary."
Mr Kuiper says the extinguisher put out the fire in an instant but first he had to find it at the back of a cupboard and in a pitch-black, smoke-filled room.
He’s learned a valuable lesson about keeping the extinguisher handy and not buried in a cupboard or drawer.
Caitlin says she was a bit panicked when her dad started shouting "fire" but she now knows how important it is to be "firewise".
"At school that day the teacher got her up in front of class to tell the story and hopefully make sure the kids go home and tell their parents to use smoke alarms," Mr Kuiper says.
"I’ve not made a big deal of it but I’ve told my mates to make sure they’ve got alarms and an extinguisher."
Father and daughter have also made an escape plan in case fire breaks out again although Mr Kuiper says he won’t be getting a similar fan heater again.
Fire Service safety education officer George Stephens says the heater seems to have developed a fault due to fair wear and tear, which makes it important for people to have working smoke alarms in their homes.
"Had the alarm not gone off there might have been a death or severe injury – there definitely would’ve been considerably more property damage," he says.
