2020-11 Neighbour House Fire

One morning I woke up and I looked out the window to see smoke and visible flames. It was coming from the location of a nearby house, about 150m meters away. It was hard to make out due to the trees between us but it looked nothing like a bonfire or something that should be there. I alerted my girlfriend, grabbed my phone and ran outside to look. Expecting to have to call the emergency services.

Fire Response

I realised the neighbours entire house had gone. What I was seeing was the smoking remains with the fire service nearby. In surprise, I messaged my friend in the fire service to tell him. He responded that he knew, because he was already there. I found the fire service had set up a large water pump on the bridge to our property to use water from the stream. I realised I had slept through the entire house burning down, the fire service attending, and a large motor-pump running.

My intent had been to integrate and be a useful member of the community, so to have been so useless in this scenario was a bit crushing. I hadn’t even noticed. I left a box of biscuits for the firefighters on their vehicle. We took no photos of the burnt house as it felt wrong.

Fire Precautions

In the weeks that followed I budgeted and purchased fire extinguishers for the house. I put automatic ones above appliances in the basement as appliance fires are one source of house fires. We also adopted a more ruthless approach to the winter influx of mice. Over the next week I stopped using live capture traps and used kill-traps to clear the mice as fast as possible. This was to avoid the risk of chewed cables starting a fire.

While thinking about fire risks I checked in the attic, which was full of a thick layer of sawdust. In the 1940s the attic and the wall cavities would have been packed with sawdust as insulation. Modern cellulose-based insulation is treated with boron to reduce fire risk. I took some sawdust from the attic and tested it outside. It burned readily.

I knew fire would quickly spread in our house. It is a wooden frame, with wooden panelling and oil-based treatments. A modern open-plan layout means fire would have no significant barriers. I started looking at the fire-related considerations much more closely.

Swedish Rural Crime Philosophy

In the aftermath, there were different theories as to the cause. Some felt it was likely an electrical fault due to mice. Others thought that it was arson by a bored person. There were some stories that the house was infested with mice. Another was that at some point previously a pipe had burst and caused extensive damage.

However, a couple of weeks before I had noticed a newly broken window pane. In the UK that damage would be to see if the house was abandoned or being monitored. The lack of repair would indicate the house was unguarded.

There was a really big difference in the attitude towards the threat that might exist. To the locals in Sweden, it was obvious that there was no threat to occupied houses. No one would ever burn down an occupied house and this would only happen to an empty and abandoned house. On a slight tangent, the attitude was also that crime is the fault of criminals, not the victim.

UK Crime Philosophy

In the UK our experience was that any negative outcome from crime was seen as your own fault. This would be that you didn’t have a big enough lock. Or you needed more locks. Or had “chosen to live in the wrong area”. If none of these, you were just “asking for it” by having something nice.

I felt like I was explaining something unimaginable to the Swedish locals when I explained that in the UK we had experienced someone trying to burn down a neighbour’s home. It had been a residential narrowboat with the owner asleep inside. We had also faced down multiple burglary attempts.

Case Studies

Arson Attack

The person was an arsonist known to the police. He had come along each boat in the residential mooring row, in the early hours when everyone was asleep. After setting light to the tarpaulin covering one boat, the attacker tried to open gas cylinders on another boat, screaming that they were going to blow it up. The occupant of the first boat woke up and was able to put out the fire with the neighbour. Another boat owner let their dogs out which scared off the attacker. Roughly an hour later the arsonist attacked another narrowboat further along the same canal stretch. The police came and the attacker was caught, but the police later released the person they had arrested due to lack of evidence. After his release the narrowboat that called the police got a brick through the window.

Trying to explain the knock-on effects of the UK social class structure is also difficult as it is so normal in the UK and so odd compared to Sweden. The fire brigade was delayed in getting to the fire because the local expensive, exclusive private school had padlocked the access bridge. This had apparently been done to stop the undesirable type of people on the narrowboats from walking through the school to reach the local town. I’ve also no news story link for the above tale as none of the above made the news. If it had happened to a row of houses, it would have made the news.

In the aftermath, the bridge remained locked. The narrowboat that got “bricked” fitted armoured shutters over the windows which remained in place as long as I saw the boat. I purchased and installed polycarbonate inside reinforcement against our mooring-facing windows.

House Burglary

On other occasions we had people attempt to steal from our rented flat while we were in it. We had to have a door open to run a tumble drier and we were sat in the same room.

Bike Theft Attempts

We also interrupted the thieves stealing from our neighbour. Bike thieves also operated openly in public during the daytime (like the time I chased Simon the bike thief). This is seen as completely normal in the UK, so as to be unremarkable.

Impact of Persistent Crime

So the UK was a lot rougher for us than Sweden. In the UK if I heard a noise in the night I had to go investigate. If I didn’t something would get stolen or vandalised. By doing so I caught bike thieves in the act of hacksawing through my bike lock and had to face them down to keep the bike. Police attendance in our experience ranged from an hour late to mostly not turning up at all.

Compared to the Swedish it was like I had PTSD. Having moved to rural Sweden I’d slowly got to the point where I wasn’t jumping out of bed to investigate every noise. It had taken months to detune. But after this house fire, I had a bit of a relapse.

Unexpected Guest

So in Sweden, one morning as I came down the stairs, someone I didn’t recognise was moving past the window about a meter from the house. In hindsight much later I think this was just our neighbour to the south, taking a shortcut to the farm across the fields to the north east of us, which he has likely been doing for years, but at the time I didn’t know and the fire had only just happened.

The Swedish have a right to roam law (Allemansrätten) but this doesn’t apply to private gardens. Friendly village life is live-and-let-live and not about fiercely enforcing every law, however. I was confused for a week or two as to what was going on.

Aftermath

I put up a motion-activated light near the bridge and left some drainage tubing out in the garden to make it clear the house was occupied and currently being worked on.

In the end, I was a bit embarrassed as to how I dealt with the entire situation. I made plans to provide an alternative path for people through the property away from the house. As a backwards step I also gave up on my Swedish lessons at this point. I think all the problems and stresses just got a bit too much and I needed time to process them. As autumn/winter got darker I retreated into a video game for a month or two.

It took a long time before I started formally studying again. I think this set back my Swedish learning for about a year.

Snowmobile Route

The first snowfall arrived this month, although light. The snowmobile signs went up with wooden stakes with a red “X” to mark the route that the snowmobiles can follow. I had never seen a snowmobile apart from on TV before.

Our First Freezer

We also replaced an appliance – the freezer seal was perished and creating lots of ice, and dated from the 1960’s. I ordered a new freezer and the old one was taken away by the delivery company.