My house. It’s L-shaped; of its six walls, only these two lack windows.
In January, a house near ours caught fire in the middle of the night and was pretty much burned out. A malfunctioning electrical blanket on a couch in the living room was the cause. Nobody got hurt. But it was scary, because Boat Hill is all kedjehus, “chain houses”, separate nearly identical brick buildings with narrow roofed spaces between them, forming contiguous blocks. The house that burned was in the block next to ours, a stone’s throw away.
An identical house seen from the same perspective.
This morning they started to tear the ruin down, using a back-hoe with a huge clawed pincer. A lot of the furnishings were still inside. No attempt was made to separate materials. Me & Jrette saw a blackened dressing gown still hanging on its hook on the bathroom’s remaining wall. We saw the claw grab two wardrobes and crunch them up like an empty milk carton. Char-edged pages from a spy novel were strewn across the street. And I felt a little queasy, because as I said, the houses here are identical. That ruin is what my own house would look like if it caught fire and had to be demolished.
Here’s what the site of the burned house looked like on 8 July after the demolition and clean-up was done.
[More blog entries about housefires; eldsvåda.]
