Ferrari Mailing List: Re: I'm Back! was: Re: George Parker - tragedy

[LS (lashdeep]

GP, so terrific to see a post from you again.

I'm glad you are still here and that it wasn't worse.

Hope to see you again soon,

LS

 

central

wines-spirits   est 1934

625 e street nw

washington, dc 20004

centralwines.com

facebook.com/CentralLiquors

202-737-2800

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From: George <ygpz4re [at] hotmail.com>
To: LS <lashdeep [at] yahoo.com>
Cc: The FerrariList <ferrari [at] ferrarilist.com>
Sent: Monday, June 8, 2015 9:53 AM
Subject: [Ferrari] I'm Back! was: Re: George Parker - tragedy

Hi everyone - I'm back!  :-)

As Matt pointed out, I was sprung from the hospital on Sunday the 24th of May (the "big event" was the 17th).  I think that the last several days were more precautionary than anything else - wanting to be sure that I would not be prone to pneumonia once back out in the real world.  My wife (an RN with the benefit of too much knowledge) thinks it was far more severe.  I always believed (naively?  Hey, it's what the doctors told me!) that I'd be out and making a full recovery.  I mean, I went in there wide awake and making fully concious decisions on my own (like that breathing tube - possible alternative was tracheotomy if vocal cords swelled to the point that I could not breathe - seemed like a no-brainer!).

Yes, the fire was (I believe) caused by electrical fault in the wiring under the dash of the Spitfire.  I had an issue with it on the drive home Friday where smoke was coming out from under the dash, but I could never *make* it smoke again.  I did find one wire, way up under there, that had 1/2" to 3/4" of insulation missing - don't know how or why, but again, could not make it smoke again.  So I thought all was ok until I could dig further into it.

We had gone out to dinner with a friend Saturday evening, and arrived home around 10pm.  We went into the house through the garage, and there was not a whiff of smoke.  So what happened between 10pm Saturday and 8am Sunday is still a mystery, but whatever it was, I'm 99.44% certain happened in the Spitfire.

So the Spitfire (which I'd owned for just about 30 years - this past Saturday was the 30 year anniversary of purchasing that car, and I still loved driving it), my wife's Miata ('04 Mazdaspeed - LOVED that car!) and my DD Jetta wagon are all total losses.  Wife's Beetle was damaged, but is already repaired and ready for pickup.  Jag was also damaged, but mostly just paint, so it will also be repaired, but the timeline for that one is a bit longer, as it will be very labor intensive.  But make no mistake - when it's done, it will have a battery cutoff switch!  ;-)

When we heard something go "thunk" on Sunday morning, I went down to investigate, and the entire garage was solid smoke, from ceiling down to about 3' from the floor.  I yelled at my wife to call 9-1-1, get the dogs and GET OUT!  Then, when I went to the side door to try and vent some smoke, the Spitfire already had solid flames rolling out from under the dash.  I found the releases for the overhead doors and got them open, but that probably just served to fan the flames and cause them to spread throughout the garage.  But I had to get Dad's old Jag out (I simply could not look my Dad in the eye and tell him that, yes, I could have gotten the car out, but chose not to....), which I did, but paid for it with burns to my shoulders, back, and forearms.  I think it was a vinyl coating from the overhead doors which was melting and dripping on my.  But I jumped in the car, fired it up, slammed it in reverse and dumped the clutch - I could hear the tires squealing on the concrete floor.  My hope was to not only save the Jag, but also - hopefully - to clear a path to get the flaming Spitfire out of the house (Jag was parked behind the Spitfire).  But that was WAAAAAAY too hot to even consider, so my next thought was to get the MIata out, but I have to move the Beetle first.  As I started to move the Beetle back from the garage (it was just outside, behind the Miata) - and I didn't learn this until I was home from the hospital over a week later - it's front end was also on fire.  Neighbors were yelling at me to get the **** out of the car - but I never heard them and never saw the flames - but boy, that hood sure was black!  And bumper/headlights/etc were all melted.  I think the flames went out by themselves as I removed it from the heat source.  Once again, when I went back for the Miata, it was simply way too hot to even consider.

But at this point, I saw my wife just inside the front door trying to gather up the dogs (6 little ankle-biters) and not having a lot of luck because they were terrified, too.  So I ran up the stairs and started grabbing whatever foot, ankle, or tail I could find and then heaved them down the stairs.  My wife then heaved them out the front door, where neighbors were already gathering and they gathered them up and brought them to a house across the street.  As I left the house, someone yelled that a "brown dog" had run back in the house.  Well, one of our dogs is brown, but two of them are kind of beige (Apricot toy poodles).  So I ran back in the house and found one of the poodles up in the living room.  Thinking "Well, maybe this is what he meant by brown dog", I scooped her up and ran back out of the house.  As I headed toward the street (our house is down a little pipestem) and the neighbors, I saw three neighbors (some of whom I don't even know!) building a human pyramid to get a guy up on the deck to rescue the real brown dog.  When they got him off, the neighbor across the street stopped me and asked how many dogs we had - when I told him 6, he said, "good I have 6 in my house, so they're all safe.  Don't go back in there again!"

At this point the ambulance guy (with a little coersion from the RN wife) convinced me to go with him, and that's when the week-long hospital stay fun began.

The house will be a total loss - the fire destroyed the garage, the two rooms above the garage (one of which housed the birds), and spread to the attic, where there is much structural damage.  The firefighters, however, were amazingly good at containing and extinguishing the fire with very little damage to personal property.  We will recover a fairly significant portion of our personal belongings, so that's a bit of a silver lining.

We also are fully aware at how incredibly fortunate we are - fortunate in that the fire did not start 4 or 5 hours earlier.  Had that happened, Matt would have had the unpleasant task of announcing my untimely demise, instead of just updating all of you on my hospital condition.  So as tragic as it seems, it could have been far, FAR worse, and we are thankful for that.  We are also fortunate that a house came available for rent right around the corner, and just exactly when we needed it.  And the owner was very flexible with us, allowing us to move in whenever we wanted and even without the initial payment, as we were still shuffling paperwork with our insurance company.

Whew!  Sorry for the novella, but I would like to thank everyone here for all of your kind thoughts, wishes, words and prayers.  They truly mean much more to me than I could ever put into words.

And now, we're looking forward to regaining just a little "normalcy" (whatever that may be following an event like this....).

:-)

George P.

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