Until August 6, 2013. My Grandma's senior living community burned down. Like burned down, burned down. My mom called me a little after 10:00 p.m. and said that there was a fire at my Grandma's apartment and that they were headed out there to check into it. The next thing I knew, my brother sent me a picture that showed the fire. It was big.
Long story short: someone's heating pad in a recliner chair caused a fire that went up into the attic. The fire started across the hall and down one from my Grandma's apartment. The building was built in a square, with a courtyard in the middle and apartments on the outside of the square and the inside (courtyard side) of the square. My Grandma's apartment was on the inside, facing the courtyard gazebo, on the south side of the building.
After a long, sleepless night, knowing the fire fighters were doing what they could to fight this, the dust settled and we realized how bad this was. My Grandma had grabbed her purse before leaving, but literally owned what she was wearing. Everything is gone. When my Mom called, I thought someone like burned a cake and they'd be back in the building in an hour or two. Not so. This is what things looked like the next morning.
This is looking into the courtyard from her front door.
Grandma had left her wedding ring on the end table where she always left it when she went outside during the fire. She was sick about it. A week and a day later, the fire fighters finally got to go back into her apartment to see if there was anything left. My Mom gave them a description of where her ring should have been, where all of her furniture was, and a general layout of her apartment.
After about 15 minutes of digging through 18" of debris, a fire fighter came out of the apartment with this....
The jeweler who is fixing the ring up (because although it looks fine, it was very sooty, and needed some attention to the prongs holding the diamond on) said that the fire was within 200ish degrees of melting that ring to a puddle. That happens at 1700 degrees (I believe that's the number he said). Grandma is thrilled to have it back.
My Mom, Dad, and I all got to go into the apartment about 3 weeks after the fire to try and find things to salvage.
My Grandma's front door. It pretty much melted off the frame.
My Mom, Dad, and me looking for anything to save. We are in Grandma's apartment, but had to keep stopping to re-evaluate where the boundaries of her apartment had been.
We found a lot of broken pieces of things.
This is Grandma's China that had been in a hutch in her bedroom.
Everything is gone. The cedar chest is gone. The Grandfather's clock is gone. Her wedding dress is gone. She had down-sized so much to move from her house into this apartment. The things she still had were the things that meant the most to her were the things she still had. They were the things she had worked to protect her whole life. Things she had kept her kids and eventually grandkids from climbing on or throwing balls around. Things she had kept safe on the trip from Detroit to South Dakota where she settled. Things that my Grandpa had bought for her or with her. It's all gone.
The overwhelmingly relieving part of this is that of the 43 residents in 41 apartments, every single one made it out safely. Many lost a lot of their stuff; Grandma unfortunately was one who lost everything.
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