SERENDIPITY

 
Arson investigation completed:

This morning I got on the roof and began the arduous task of determining the cause of yesterday's fire.
The decades old metal triple wall flue is designed to look like a brick chimney.
When I got it apart, the cause and culprit became clear. Over the years we have had problems keeping birds and squirrels out of the fireplace. There was some chicken wire around the top opening but none around the opening just below it. The top opening is where the flue gasses are exhausted. The bottom opening just allows access to the box that surrounds the outside of the flue pipe. The chicken wire was in bad shape, that's how the critters were able to penetrate my perimeter.
I kept rigging up the wire to fend off the critters, but never worried about the other opening. The evil birds exploited this oversight and over the years made many nests and you can see from this picture looking at where the paint is scorched how thick the buildup of bird nest material was.

This was no creosote fire as I first suspected, this was a deliberated act of malice by many generations of evil dirty birds. When I got the fire going really hot, an ember must have gotten into the nest.


I was lucky to be outside when the square birds nest ignited as there was a lot of material left to burn. Dumping 2 buckets of water in the box put the fire out quickly. At the time I thought the fire was much lower down in the flue pipe itself. I was trying to get the water in the pipe where the fire wasn't. Due to the design, most of the water ended up in the box where the fire was. Serendipitous is what they call that.

This morning, I got it all the cleaned out and got some real heavy duty hardware screen and blocked access to both openings. When the weather breaks I'll find some better matching paint and it will look good as new.

 Jojo was nervous about me firing up the fireplace so I waited till she left and got a nice toasty fire going.
 

 The fortunate chain of events that kept this from being a total house fire, harkened me back to another serendipitous moment many years ago.

Way back when I lived out in the boonies of Morgan County we came home and I could hear water spraying in the crawlspace. I had used plastic polypropylene water pipe from the ground to the house. I had heat tape on the pipe and it had ignited close to the floor. When I got under the house I could see a burnt area of the underside of the house 4 foot in diameter. The fire had been going good and would have destroyed our home.
That's when serendipity came calling.

Because I had used plastic pipe instead of copper or iron, the fire melted a hole in the pipe and the water was spraying in a nice round pattern about 5 feet in diameter hitting the underside of the house perfectly covering the 4 foot area of burning wood.


I shut off the water supply and laid on my back staring up and the heavily scorched wood dripping with water and shook my head. We had just gotten home from church and could have come home to a pile of burning rubble.
Thank you serendipity!

 Of course I am being glib giving thanks to a pile of fortunate coincidences. I leave that to the atheists of the world. As I lay on my soaking wet back that day in my crawlspace, I gave thanks to God, like I did last night when I went to bed and reviewed the days events.

I thanked God that I happened to walk outside at the exact time the fire started.
I thanked God I had finally gotten my ladder back after several months of being AWOL. I thanked God I had a bucket handy.

Maybe I will give serendipity a little credit for the design of the flue pipe that forced me to pour the water in an area that I didn't intend, but where the fire actually was.
Ehhhhh, maybe not.  Thank you God for that bit of fortune too!