Caught Fire!

You know how sometimes  you secretly wish for something exciting to happen in your otherwise-monotonous life, and then when that exciting thing happened, you wish you had the sanity not to wish for such a thing in the first place?

I happened to be at home today because both Joey and I are very sick and down with fever. Sometime in the late morning, I walked from the living room to the kitchen, only to find something really ‘extraordinary’.

The bamboo poles and clothes hanging outside the house were on FIRE.

No, I am not joking. There were burning objects falling down onto my bamboo poles of clothes from don’t know where, and before long, almost all the clothes were on fire. We quickly scooped basins of water to put out the fire, while trying to ascertain where the burning objects were coming from.

This is what was left at the actual scene:

Could you see the charred parts of the bamboo poles? One of them melted through and was hanging at halfway mark. The clothes pegs were not spared too….

Some clothes totally melted beyond recognition.

When I looked up, this was what greeted me. The unit above me had his entire mop burnt.

 

After putting out the fire, the only logical thing I could do was to call the Police. So for the 1st time in my life, I dialed ‘999’. The operator directed me to the Woodlands Neighborhood Police Post, and they sent 2 police officers to my place to investigate.

Just before the police arrived, 5 contractors came down to my house and told us that there were doing welding works at roof top and because the person doing the welding is a new guy on the job, he had not done a good job boundary-ing off the welding, and burning pieces of stainless steel came flying down from roof top, and consumed my bamboo poles & clothes. How scary! What if nobody hanged their clothes out, and the burning steel burnt a passer-by at level 1?? It would have been disastrous!

Anyway, the police came and told us it’s not within their jurisdiction (as it’s negligence, and not purposeful damage etc), and told us to negotiate for a compensation with the contractors since they were very apologetic & sincere in making amendments.

So weird right?? How to negotiate for a compensation for some burnt bamboo poles & clothings?? How about the trauma of seeing our clothes on fire??

In any case, since the other party was apologetic, we didn’t want to pursue the matter, and asked them to just give a token sum of compensation. After checking with their bosses, they came back with this:

 

That ends my exciting adventure.