It was just another Tuesday morning for Paul and
Crissy Smith (not their real last name). Paul headed to work at 8:45 a.m at
Prep And Save. Crissy had already been at her office next-door for an hour.
Paul worked on building emergency kits in the warehouse before talking with
some customers. Crissy answered phone calls and helped customers get their
orders correct. Both were just going about their days when they received a
phone call telling them that their house was on fire.
“It was 11:35 a.m. on November 19,
2014,” Paul recalls. “When I got the call I just wondered how bad the
devastation was going to be. I didn’t know how much of a loss we had suffered.
I thought we were going to be homeless for a while.”
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A house fire changed their lives.
Photo courtesy of nvdaily.com |
Paul and Crissy ran and jumped into
their Jeep. He floored the gas pedal, racing down McCarran Boulevard towards his
home. Dozens of thoughts were flooding through his mind. How did this happen? Were his kids okay? How bad was the damage to the
house going to be?
One thought that did not rush through his mind was: why did this happen to me today? That
thought did not rush through his mind because he, unlike most other people, was
prepared. One thing Paul always tried to do, as a prepper, was to expect the
unexpected and be prepared for anything. He wasn’t worried about why it
happened, because he knew he was prepared for it.
When he got to his house, the firemen were putting out
the last of the flames. Luckily, a fire truck and team of firemen had been
practicing drills at Reed High School, just a mile down the road earlier that
morning. A student pointed out the smoke that was coming from the house fire
and the firemen were there within minutes. They began dousing the home with
water and the damage was far less than it could have been if they were not so
close.
“The outside didn’t look that bad at first glance, but
the inside was totally destroyed,” Paul said.
The damage ended up being severe as the back of the
house burned up, as did the attic, and much of the interior. It was obvious
that immense repairs were needed. Paul felt his heart sink in his chest. Even
though he was prepared, he knew it was going to be a long uphill battle until
everything returned back to normal for him and his family. Crissy had a
different view.
“Does this mean we get a new refrigerator?” she
asked. “And a new paint job for the house too?”
Paul just laughed and laughed about what she had said.
Crissy decided to not let her house burning down get her down. She knew that
they had fire insurance just for this purpose. The insurance would cover most
if not all of the damage to the house and their possessions inside it. However,
Paul was not on the same page.
“I didn’t know we had fire insurance. It was my wife’s
house and she paid the insurance bill,” Paul said. “So I was planning on
running into the garage to grab my tent and my prepping supplies so we would
have somewhere to stay that night.”
The Smith’s weren’t allowed back into their house
until 7:30 p.m. that night. An insurance agent joined them. By then it was dark
and cold and they only had a few minutes to grab some clothes. The insurance
agent took the clothes to get them treated by a special process which would
remove the smoky smell. Then the agent took them to a nearby hotel where they
would stay for the next two weeks.
The next morning, both Paul and Crissy took off of
work. They went back to the house with the agent and he assessed the damages.
They grabbed the rest of their clothes and many possessions to get treated to
get rid of the smoke damage. Paul and Crissy walked into their bedroom and sat
down. They exchanged some words and both started laughing.
“The insurance agent asked us why we were laughing,
why we weren’t sad about all the damage,” Paul said. “We told him that no one
was hurt, that we were Christians, and that we knew it was all going to be
okay. I was still laughing about Crissy’s comment on the new fridge.”
There was also a man checking to see if the house had
asbestos anywhere. If so the process would have taken months longer to rebuild
everything. This man was a Christian too.
“He came over and said that he was glad we were
Christians and asked if he could pray with us,” Paul said. “So we all sat down,
even the insurance agent who wasn’t a Christian, and we prayed. We said thank
you lord that no one was hurt, and asked for his help.”
Paul stayed calm and collected during the whole
process. His family was uninjured. Even his pet chickens were fine, although
one got a little singed. They were actually the cause of the fire. One of the
chickens had knocked over the heating element which was in the coup. This lit
the coup on fire, which in turn caught the house on fire. Paul decided his
chickens would no longer get a heating element in their next coup.
“All in all, it cost about $225,000 to rebuild the
house,” Paul said as he began listing off all the repairs that had to be done.
“The roof had to be taken off and completely replaced. The house had to be
completely repainted with a special paint because of smoke damage. The carpet,
the Sheetrock, and even the lawn all had to be torn out and replaced.”
The Smith’s
insurance company paid for them to stay in a rental condo for eight months
while their house was being rebuilt. They paid for many of Paul’s prized
possessions, including his television set and his emergency food supply.
Unfortunately, the fire destroyed all of his prepping food, so he had to start rebuilding
his supply from scratch.
He was not deterred by this. In fact, if anything,
this reinforced his belief in emergency preparedness more than anything else.
It was just another Tuesday, a week to go before Thanksgiving, nothing special.
Paul was at work like normal. He didn’t start the fire, it wasn’t arson — it
was an accident by a pet chicken that caused the fire.
“My advice to people is to love your family,” Paul
said. “Make sure you have insurance. Take pictures of what you own in case you
need to replace it one day. Have a hard copy of all your important documents. I
should have had a binder with all the info I needed in it. I tell everyone to
make that binder now.”
Accidents can happen at any given time. They don’t
come with a warning. One day you’re living life like normal and then you get a
call that your house is on fire. Or there was a tornado that ravaged the whole
town, including your house. Or there was a flash-flood that did irrevocable
damage to your home and cars. Or any of a number of other accidents that could
happen to you and your family.
These kinds of accidents can destroy your normal life
and tear apart your family financially, unless you are prepared. This means
having insurance which will cover the damage to your home and pay for a place
for your family to stay. It also means having a plan of what to do if an
accident happens or a disaster strikes.
Paul was prepared and his family made it through just
fine after the fire. They were displaced from their home for eight months, but
everything turned out alright because they were prepared and had a plan. What
if something happened to you and your family, would you be prepared?
To get prepared, go to prepandsave.com today!
