Starting over after house fire

Ruapehu Bulletin, Volume 8, Issue 375, 26 February 1991, Page 2

Starting over after house fire

Anyone wishing to help Mr & Mrs Edwards with donations or loans of household goods, especially furniture, clothing and blankets can ring Mrs Odey on 54 155 or leave small items at the Bulletin office and we will arrange for them to be delivered.

Horopito farm worker Rod Edwards and his wife Tina are wondering where to start in rebuilding their lives after a fire totally destroyed the house they were living in Monday last week.

Mr Edwards said they lost everything in the fire and that he was left with the T shirt and tracksuit pants he was wearing when the blaze started. He said the episode

has hit Mrs Edwards very hard. "She doesn't ever want to see the place again," he said. "The shock, the distress for her of the whole thing, of her thinking I was still inside was too much." She is staying with her parents at Taupo at the moment "I don't know what we're going to do next," said Mr Edwards. Mr Edwards was pumping diesel into the farm tractor about 200 metres away when the fire started, probably in the lounge, but they can't be sure where or

how the fire started. He said he had only been gone from the' house a few minutes and heard his wife scream above the noise of the pump. He said he saw smoke billowing out of the lounge windows, then ran accross the paddocks to the house. He said he tried to get into the back of the house to save a wardrobe of their best clothes, which also had his hunting rifles in. "But it was just too hot. It took off so quickly." The house belongs to the Edwards Brothers (no relation) who Ron was working for and he said he thinks it was insured.

But the contents were not insured. All of their furniture is gone, all the appliances including a new freezer. The chest remains in one piece but the meat inside is completely gone. All the Edwards' clothes, blankets and linen was destroyed, even the clothes in the washing machine, ruined by the melted plastic agitator. He said the neighbours, particularly Mrs Anne Odey who has loaned him a house for the meantime and helped out with meals, had been fantastic. On Thursday when the Bulletin called he and Mrs Odey were searching through the rubble try-

ing to find some of their important documents, keys, or anything that could be salvaged. Mrs Odey was gathering a box of charred ornaments, including two blackened glass mugs which were mementos of Mr Edwards' service in Vietnam in the 1960s, to try to clean up for him. Mr and Mrs Edwards had been in the house six months and had carried out a lot of work to tidy it up. They were in the process of re-paper-ing some of the rooms, had fixed and painted the water tank, put up new fences right round the property and planted a large vegetable garden. "We were really getting the place looking good. It was a good house, had a nice friendly atmosphere," said Mr Edwards.