Orlando Sentinel
WINTER PARK, Fla. — On Wednesday, Marc Casey stood in front of his house at 1216 Golfside Drive in Winter Park, and acknowledged that from the outside, it looked sturdy and appealing.
Then he added, “But you haven’t seen the inside yet.”
Casey, a firefighter at the Kennedy Space Center Firefighters, encouraged people to brace themselves before walking into his home, which inside was very badly damaged by fire, heavy smoke, and the water used to extinguish the flames. But at the same time, he was still very grateful for one fact: while he was at work when the blaze started, a smoke detector had alerted his sleeping family to the danger, and they all got out alive.
The fire, he noted, started in the attic space right above his bedroom, where his wife was in bed.
“While she was asleep,” he said, “the fire is in the attic over her – raging above her,” Casey said.
That’s also the reason why Winter Park Fire Chief Jim White decided to hold an open house at the Casey home on Wednesday, allowing area residents to see the devastation that the fire caused on Aug. 11, when an electrical short circuit occurred, creating a massive electrical fire.
White said he hoped to use this event to stress to people a simple fact: that smoke detectors save lives.
“The scenario that surrounds the fire certainly gives us an opportunity to educate people on the benefit of smoke detectors,” White said. “Had smoke detectors not been there, we could have had a different outcome.”
Casey, who has worked as a firefighter for more than 32 years, said he got a call that terrible night from his wife.
“I get a call at midnight from my wife, saying ‘The house is on fire,’ ” he said. “I said, ‘What does that mean,’ and she said, ‘Oh, the firefighters are here. And they’re pulling wires.’ Well, when she said that, I knew that was bad.”
Fire-rescue crews responded to the home and were able to extinguish the fire, but only after it caused severe damage. But as Casey noted, his wife, their two children, and the family’s two dogs all made it out alive and unharmed.
“The fire alarm woke her up,” Casey said of his wife. “She got everyone out, and started looking for a fire extinguisher. When they (the Fire Department) got here, the fire was in the attic, fully involved, overlapping into the kitchen. It was an electric short of unknown cause. If there had not been a working smoke detector in the house, it could have been very bad.”
White noted that nothing the family did contributed to the cause of the fire.
“They didn’t do anything,” he said. “It just kind of proves the fact that it can happen anywhere. You don’t have to do anything wrong.”
But White added that he hopes to use this case to demonstrate that one very simple step – the purchase and installation of smoke detectors – can make all the difference.
“Really, the smoke detector in every space is the first line of defense,” White said. “They easily could have slept right through it. Certainly, if it had been any longer, with all the smoke, you can easily become disoriented, and not find your way out. You can easily become unconscious.”
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