Naheedy's Fire

Our good friend John Naheedy recently set his room on fire. He’s in his intern year/first year of residency in Santa Barbara, CA. Here’s his story in his own words. I’ll get the image uploaded as soon as I can…something’s wrong with my blogging software:

Dudes, sorry I’ve been out of touch…

But you’ve heard right, my apartment burned down….well, not the
whole thing, just my bedroom. The rest of it is just really smokey or
wet/moldy.

Long story short, I was sleeping one night before I was on call the
next day and I woke up around 4:30am b/c it was really warm in my
apartment…turns out that was b/c my mattress and sheets were on
fire! Yeah, I awoke to 2 ft flames arising from the foot of my bed
near my right leg. My mattress and sheets had caught fire from an
adjacent faulty electrical wire running from my alarm clock to the
wall.

I jumped out of bed, pulled my down comforter off and stomped it out.
By now the foam (very combustable) mattress was fully ablaze. I ran to the kitchen, grabbed 2 huges jugs of water and poured them on the area of the bed and adjacent wall. Of course, this did nothing - and in
fact it started to spark (telling me that it was an electrical fire).
So I immediately called 911 and started opening the windows to let the billowy black smoke out. Within 2 minutes I had to start crawling on
my hands/knees to avoid the smoke as I was trying to salvage things.
The Santa Barbara Fire Department showed up in minutes, climbed on the
roof to cut a hole and let the smoke out, then made me evacuate before they entered the building with full helmet masks on, and 3 of them
held the fire hose and doused the crap out of my bedroom. Basically,
whatever wasn’t burned was soaked.

I can’t really complain though b/c it could have been much worse. At
least I woke up; or at least I was home to be able to call the FD,
otherwise the damage would have been a lot worse. Moral of the
story…always have renters insurance! I’ve included a pic that the
fire inspector sent me.