Sparky

Written 3/15/08

I had a near death experience plus God saved all of our stuff.

Sounds interesting right? This is what happened. In getting Rick's belongings out of his other house and storage building, we found a dryer. Since our dryer takes 2 full 70 minute cycles to dry a load of clothes, we figured we would try the one we found and see if it worked before starting to replace heating elements and such in the one we have. So the dryer has been in the middle of the kitchen since our moving furniture marathon. I decided that I would tackle this task while Rick was at work today.

I moved all of the dirty clothes out of the laundry room. (9 people remember, there is never a time that I can recall that the laundry has been all finished.) I slid the old dryer out of its place, and pushed the new dryer into position. When I plugged the dryer up, it was already on, so I quickly turned it off. I slid on the dryer lint hose thing onto the back of the dryer. (I don't know the name of this hose thing, but it is made out of tin-foil type material, and looks like a robot arm. It runs from the dryer into a hole in the floor, under the floor, and comes out of the side of the house.) So when I let go of the dryer-lint robot arm hose, it touched the outlet plug, and sparks started shooting everywhere. They probably shot 4 feet into the air, and continued sparkling like a fire-cracker while I grabbed the dryer and pulled it out from the wall until the robot-arm-hose fell and the sparks stopped. I took a deep breath and decided that I would wait until later to finish this particular chore. Quite a bit of smoke was coming from the laundry room, so I opened all of the windows and sent the kids outside. I was very impressed with the amount of smoke that electrical sparks cause, and shortly decided to leave the house myself. I went over to my mother's house and called Rick at work to tell him about my near death experience.

I let him know that if I had been touching the robot arm or had been in a different position, I would have been fried. After a long conversation of making sure that he was grateful that I was alive, I decided to take a nap. What else do you do when you narrowly escape death by electrocution? Plus, I wasn't feeling very well today. When Rick got home a couple of hours later, I woke up and we went into the laundry room so that I could reenact the whole thing. While in there, he noticed a loud water sound, and went into the kids bathroom on the other side of the wall, but they didn't have any water on. So, outside and under the house he went to investigate. He came back in to tell me to come outside.

Our house had been on fire! Apparently the robot-arm-hose was full of lint, and the sparks had started it on fire. it completely burnt up, catching the surrounding wood, sheetrock, and insulation, all the way out to the dryer-exhaust hole in the siding of the house. There is melted siding and burn marks all around the exhaust hole. The way that God put out the fire, is that the fire burned into the water pipes that supply the washing machine, and they were spraying like crazy, putting out the fire.

I had never even thought to check if the electrical sparks had started a fire, and although I was amazed at the amount of smoke, I thought that it had come from the sparks. The smoke was actually coming from our house burning up while I walked around and opened windows. I have no idea how long our house burned before God put out the fire, but I am grateful.

So this was very exciting, and amazing, but Rick is now disgusted. He started to pull out the burnt-up insulation and sheetrock from under the house to get to the melted pipes to fix the water leak, but it got dark and he worked all day, so we have our main water line cut off, and tomorrow it looks like he has his work cut out for him. So that is how I nearly got electrocuted and we nearly lost our house. And praise God that he put out the fire.