SEQUIM — God may make the scenery in our mountain greenery, but you’d best buy a surge adapter for protection from electrical fires.
Far up in the Olympic foothills at 1092 McCrorie Road, Jean and Rick Rickerson learned that lesson from a near disaster.
About 8:30 a.m. Dec. 19 down at the Clallam County Public Utility District’s Agnew substation, cracked electrical insulators failed and let a line fall to the ground.
That caused a six-hour power outage to about 2,500 customers in the Carlsborg area.
It also sent a voltage surge that, when it hit the Rickerson house, overloaded a plastic power strip in son Drew’s bedroom.
Molten materials ignited Drew’s bed, and by the time smoke detectors sounded the alarm, the unoccupied room was fully involved in flames.
Then things got worse.
Accesses hampered by ice
Snow had been hard-packed by vehicles traveling McCrorie Road, and an overnight rainfall had coated the snow with ice.
Although the Rickersons’ home security system automatically alerted Fire District 3, the fire truck skidded off the road and into a ditch.
It was 10:15 a.m. before firefighters arrived.
The home probably would have burnt to the ground if Rick hadn’t told builders to install 5/8-inch fire-stop gypsum board throughout in the house.
Clallam County’s building code requires it for ceilings, but Rick had it installed on interior walls too.
Rick also had steel doors mounted throughout the home. As a result, Drew’s room was charred, but the rest of the house escaped all but smoke damage.
“It flat out ruined everything in that room,” Rick said.
He estimated damage to his house at around $40,000.
Quiet crusade
Today the Rickersons are on a quiet crusade to share their experience.
On Jan. 7, they invited neighbors to their home to meet with utility district Commissioner Ted Simpson and Allen Knobbs, assistant chief of Fire District 3.
Simpson told the group of about 24 people that the voltage surge probably caused the power strip to fail.
It also may have simultaneously overloaded a space heater, burned out rheostats and damaged computer accessories at neighbors’ houses.
Knobbs told them that, had the fire escaped Drew’s bedroom, it probably would have burned down the house.
Even if the fire truck hadn’t slid into a ditch, the best response time from the Carlsborg fire station would have been 15 minutes.
“Fifteen minutes is a long time when your house is on fire,” Knobbs told Peninsula Daily News.
“Sometimes people move over here from the big city,” he said, “and they take services for granted.
“People don’t realize that we live in a very rural community.”
“It’s not the fire department’s fault,” Jean told the PDN. “We’re just too far from help.
“We were lucky, and our goal is to educate others so that they will know what their risks are, how to defend themselves while they wait for help, and what changes need to be made to prevent this from happening.”
