Karlijn, Liza and Lotte narrowly escaped a fire in their student house in Groningen: “The smoke alarm saved our lives”

28 September 2023, 3:20 a.m.

Like almost every evening, Lotte had turned on the dishwasher to let it run overnight. Afterwards, she went to bed. Shortly after falling asleep, she was awakened by the piercing beep of the smoke alarm. She also noticed the electricity had gone out. “I immediately thought: something is seriously wrong, this is not just a dead battery.”

“When I walked downstairs, I could already smell smoke. In the kitchen, I saw flames coming from the back of the dishwasher. My housemate Karlijn tried to put out the fire with a fire extinguisher, but it didn’t work. Because the smoke had already made it difficult to breathe, we opened the front and back doors. But that only caused the flames to spread more rapidly, setting the kitchen cabinets on fire as well.”

Standing outside in their pyjamas

“We decided to give up trying to fight the fire and ran outside to call the emergency number. I was only wearing my pyjamas, and Karlijn managed to grab a pair of shorts on the way out. Our other housemate, Liza, also ran outside with us. Not long after we arrived outside, we heard the kitchen cabinets crashing down. All three of us were very upset and immediately called our parents. We also had to be checked by the paramedics because we had inhaled smoke. Luckily, it turned out alright, but for several days afterwards we still had sore throats and were coughing a lot.”

Smoke and water damage

“Fortunately, the fire brigade brought the fire quickly under control, but our house had become uninhabitable. The kitchen and the shared living room were destroyed by the fire, and everything on the floor above was covered in soot. Truly everything was blackened. You can’t clean that off anymore. There was also extensive water damage from the firefighting efforts. The house had become like a ghost house. All our clothes smelled of smoke, and the smell wouldn’t come out. Overnight, we had become homeless and had lost everything.”

A strange blur

“The first few days after the fire were a bit of a blur. Suddenly, we had so many things to arrange. We slept poorly and our minds were racing. Things are better now, and all three of us have found new places to live. Once our old student house is renovated, we don’t want to move back there.
The thought of returning makes us feel uneasy. The firefighters later told us: if you had woken up five minutes later, things could have ended very differently.”

“Fire can start when you least expect it. In our case, it turned out to have been caused by a short circuit in the dishwasher. If we could give other students one piece of advice, it would be this: make sure you have multiple smoke alarms installed in your home. For example, in the kitchen and near the washing machine and dryer. And replace the batteries on time. It’s a small effort, but it can save your life.”