(Having a bit of a mutter here...)
There was a fire a couple of weeks ago down the road from us which destroyed the roof and top floors of a 3-storey block of flats and (I assume) waterlogged the lower two floors, displacing the tenants of
24 flats (no injuries). The flats were built about 20 years ago, but that's not relevant to what's got me muttering under my breath about the situation.
The immediate post-fire communication from the Fire&Rescue service was tight-lipped in terms of the cause -- understandably, as there's liability to consider -- but inevitably led to uninformed speculation.
After a few days, the first official word from the F&R service was that they were confident it wasn't arson, followed some days later by a statement describing it as an "electrical fault". That frightened the horses, as it raised the obvious question for the displaced tenants as to whether it was a "fault" of the electrical system, somebody DIY-ing what they shouldn't have, a dodgy appliance, or whatever.
After another week or so, word appears to have been put out that it's believed to have started when something like an iron was left drawing power from one of those enclosed extension cable reels that was being used while coiled up.
Although anyone reading this group will know that that's not a good idea, experience suggests that it's not as widely known as it should be by the general public -- or, more importantly, *why* cables should be unwound.(fn)
What I find unsettling is that (as far as I can make out), the F&R service seems to now be stating what they think was the likely cause of the fire, but hasn't gone furthter to explain why a coiled-up cable coould have been the problem. Coupled with their earlier "electrical fault" comment, I suspect there will be a number of people out there who'll conclude that it was a defective cable or appliance, rather than a perfectly sound cable (and appliance) that was being used in an unsafe manner.
(fn) I'm thinking here of my sister-in-law - an intelligent and capable woman who I noticed was un-coiling only as much cable as she needed, and without considering the load. She'd seen an instruction somewhere that it should be unwound, but she didn't have the foggiest idea why that was advisable, as no-one had ever explained it to her.
We'd had a similar discussion a few years earlier as to why it wasn't a good idea to have 13 amp fuses in every plug in the house, even though that's what was supplied to her in the days when everything came with an "unplugged" cable, and the shop charged extra for a plug (with a 13amp fuse) that she was supposed to wire up herself.
(Anyway, muttering episode over.)