"It was a typical summer day, warmer than most."

January 21, 2010

We were young. That is my only excuse for the fact that we didn't have renters insurance. Bad things don't happen to good people, right? We found out the hard way that bad things can and do happen to good people and that the young and naive are not immune from catastrophic loss.

It was a typical summer day, warmer than most. We didn't have air-conditioning in our apartment. The only way to cool off the air was to use a fan. We had an oscillating fan that was sitting on top of a cedar chest and was moving the air around our bedroom.

I had done the laundry and a pile of clean, folded clothes was sitting beside the fan on the cedar chest. The window curtains were pulled back and the fan was doing a good job of cooling the upstairs. The baby and her two older brothers were asleep in the other upstairs bedroom.

I was downstairs enjoying a few quiets moments in a busy day. Within a few minutes some neighbors came running, telling me that there was smoke pouring out of my bedroom window. I will never know how the curtain became entangled in the fan, but it did and the fan overheated. It set the curtains on fire, and the top of the cedar chest and the pile of clothing were ablaze.

After I grabbed my children and ran outside, we waited for the fire department to come and put out the fire. It only took a few minutes really, but the amount of damage was quite devastating. What most people don't realize is that it isn't the fire that does most of the damage, it is the smoke. It was everywhere in every room. It gets into the closets and all your clothes smell like smoke.

When everything calmed down, we realized that our bedroom was a disaster. The hope chest was ruined, needless to say; the curtains and the fan were a total loss. What we also lost was the pile of freshly washed laundry, which was several outfits for each of us, and our bedspread had also been ruined from flying sparks. We were very lucky that it didn't set the whole bed on fire.

The entire second floor of the apartment was unlivable. We had to move all five of us into the living room and sleep and live there for the month that it took for the cleaning company to work and for the upstairs to be repainted.

The loss was much more than the premium would have been for renters insurance. Did we get insurance after that? You bet we did. Now we know that bad things can happen to anyone at anytime, and the best thing you can do is be prepared.

— Isabelle from CT

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