It’s Saturday night, and after a good four hour snowmobile ride throughout the Qu’Appelle Valley region of Saskatchewan, the Nelson’s are curled up in front of the fire watching a movie. Earlier in the evening, Noray Nelson, age 20, decided to clean out the embers from the fireplace in order to lite a new one. Using a plastic bucket, he scoops the ashes into the pail, and places it outside the front door.

A little while later, Noray’s dad hears banging. Thinking it’s nothing, Noray gets up, and casually ambles over to the front door to investigate. He opens it, and is greeted by flames shooting up the outside wall of the cabin. The cottage is on fire. Fortunately, neighbors out for a walk see the flames and are able to bring it quickly under control by throwing snow on it.

There is a good lesson in here for all of us cottagers. Just because a fire is out, doesn’t mean the coals are not still active. In Noray’s case, he saw a couple of ambers when he was cleaning out the ashes, but didn’t think anything of it. It’s also not a good idea to use a plastic bucket to store ashes. The live coals melted the bucket, and then started a fire on the wooden deck beneath it. From there it quickly spread up the side of the cabin wall.

The cabin sustained some scorch marks but nothing significant. It just goes to show that fires can happen at any time of day, and now with so many folks spending the weekends at their cabins and using their fireplaces, people need to be exercise caution.

Cheers,

Julie

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 10:50 am and is filed under Today's News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.