What survived the fire
By Thrishantha Nanayakkara
It was around 1 am on 9th September 2019. I woke up hearing somebody banging on the door. It took a while to realize what was going on when I heard a faint fire alarm in the corridor. I alerted my wife and woke up my son and daughter. I could see a glare outside the window. It was a real fire in the building. I was in a sarong, but didn’t have the time to get into a jean. Just picked the mobile phone to call the police and ran out. I could see burning debris falling outside the front door, but ran through it. Outside, I could see a shocked community of 23 families from the Richmond house. Fear, despair, uncertainty, and helplessness were shaking us. We walked round to the hill on the other side of the building and watched how police and fire service vehicles were ramming in. Soon it was a long line up of fire trucks. Two firefighters were squirting water into the building. But the fire grew in rage and engulfed one side of the building very fast. Time was running very fast, but my guess was that the fire moved from one end to the other, where our flat was located, in about 15 minutes.https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-49630496
Questions started to pour in. Will we lose everything we had? Children’s school books, passports, certificates, our memories in different countries we have lived in, photo albums, laptop computers, data backups,...The list of things to say goodbye grew and grew. I told my wife to say goodbye to everything and to resolve to start again. We as a family came a long way and we can take a step at a time in the right direction and see how far we go. The most important thing was that we were alive. Then the thought of what might have happened to the neighbors crept in. Did all the families wake up on time? Is there anybody trapped inside? Horror made us numb. The police asked us to move to the Maple lodge for further meetings and guidance. My daughter was watching the fire and expressing gratitude to the flat that gave us shelter for the past 4 years. I am not sure how she was coping up with the thought of losing all her school notes as an A/L student. My son who is 13, kept silent, but I could imagine the thoughts going through him. He didn’t have time to pick up the Teddy he was sleeping with for the past 8 years.
At the Maple lodge, we saw a rush of help from neighbors. People had woken up in this mid night and were preparing drinks and food for those affected. Donations of blankets came pouring in. One neighbor gave us toothbrushes. That was our first possession in this new life. I was trying to reach out to emails on my mobile phone to inform my head of department that I won’t be coming for a few days, but I couldn’t read without glasses. So, I waited till another neighbor gave me temporary reading glasses. One by one, we began to realize that the life we take as mine is so conditioned upon so many things around us. The loss of even minor things like “my toothbrush” leave a gaping hole in life for a while.
The generosity and kindness of the Hamptons community was so heartening. Early in the morning neighbors living in houses volunteered to take some affected families in. We had never met Catherine, but she took us to her place and made us feel warm. She even gave us the house keys when she left to drop the children at school. The kindness of people whom we had never met rose above the might of the fire. Then things picked up fast. Media started to report the incident, and communities started to raise funds to help the 23 families that were affected.
The first meeting was around 10am where the fire service, the Metropolitan Thames Valley Housing Association (MTVHA), the police service, and other stakeholders gave briefings about the crisis management plan. Any ambiguity in the statements magnified residents’ fears and concerns. The breach of trust was so apparent in our faces. How could such a new construction catch fire that fast? Were those wooden structures not properly treated to be fire resistant? When are we going to see the reports from the police and the fire service? What will the building insurers will and will not do? When will we know the state of the building after extinguishing the fire, to know if anything can be rescued? What will the government do as a regulatory and law enforcement body to protect residents’ rights? There were more questions than answers.
The fire service, having extinguished the fire, offered to rescue most essential items from designated areas deemed to be safe to walk in our flats. Our first priority was to see what could be rescued from the children’s rooms. Seth’s Teddy was among the survivors. School books and notes were so soaked in the water. The Teddy had layers of wet dirt on it. We could imagine the night it had gone through on Seth’s bed in a room full of smoke, dust, and then a shower of water from the fire service. But these few rescued items were so precious to us. It was nice to see some other neighbors also seeing some of their precious items back.
Given my experience in this case, I think it is extremely important to allow residents to see the aftermath of the natural disaster using technology like drone based video recording. These simple technologies now readily available can help those affected to manage expectations. So, I suggested MTVHA to hire such a service soon. It is difficult to estimate the structural strength of what survived. Waiting for structural engineers to give a calculation is good, but the time taken to do that means we expose any belongings to fast natural degradation under exposed conditions. So, I suggested MTVHA to use a temporary internal scaffolding to move into each flat, so that we can rescue the essentials fast and move the scaffolding to another flat. Many meetings without much concrete information about the next actions increasingly frustrated the affected community risking a breakdown of communication. In times like these, meetings should be brief and need driven. For instance, the information about how much monthly rent the insurance will cover is a critical information to get the community to start looking for alternative medium term accommodation. It took quite a while to come to an estimate of the current value of a flat we lost. That could be fast tracked by asking us to submit the most recent valuation we have got. Then a calculation of the rental market value of such properties would have been easy. Tensions grew over such critical matters till we had to contact the local MP and other government agencies to interfere. Finally, MTVHA officers gave us a reasonable figure for renting alternative properties, but the impasse was about 2-weeks and the cost of the wait was unwarranted.
Despite all this calamity, the community came together strongly in casual meetings in the hotel and through a whatsapp group. We could see how different families were coping with the situation and everybody gave each other warmth and encouragement. Immediate family and relatives gave us cash to buy essential items to rebuild life. Sensei Frank T Perry of our Karate dojo gave us new Karate gis and belts free of charge to help us resume practices that gave us confidence to face challenges. My son’s school and former school had collected donations including money to help him. He did a homestay for a couple of nights at one of his good friend's place. Those parents took good care of him while we were busy attending to urgent things. It was heartening to see Bernie, the friend's mom washing and ironing Seth's school clothes. My daughter’s friends had given her gifts that were so precious to her. My university mates living in England came rushing in with whatever they thought was essential and useful. My nephew Minoru and his wife Nipunadie living in London took us to their place and cooked us some delicious Sri Lankan food. That rest in a homely environment gave us a fresh start. All these reminded us that life is not about things that a fire could burn, a flood could wash away, or a storm could blow away. It is about what is in our relationships that won’t go on fire.
One day, I was in my laboratory working on an experiment when I got a call from one of our fellow residents called Abi. She told me that her content insurers are offering to help to rescue some items from my flat and wanted permission to enter. I went through the roof. She kindly got her insurance company to be in a call with me so I could guide them. It was such a relief that we could rescue some passports, certificates, and data backups. This was a lifesaver. Our friend Waruna’s wife volunteered to drive to the site immediately to get those items into her car till we could come. My wife Visakha then dashed to the site soon after her work and rescued some more items that were so dear to us. It was quite surprising to notice that IKEA furniture had survived the fire that the building material could not.
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| IKEA dining table |
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| Kitchen. The IKEA cupboard in the far end survived, saving our passports and certificates. |
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| Kitchen |
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| Living room. The floor was wooden, and it survived. |
I wrote to my meditation teacher at Amaravati Buddhist monastery to stress how helpful the practice was to cope with the situation. The ability to find inner silence was very important to notice that refuge is not in the things that move around, but in the solid compassionate awareness that cannot be disturbed. The power of that became so apparent when things that I even remotely thought could be a ground to anchor happiness crumbled and cracked.
In the hotel, I came to know that one of the chefs in the breakfast crew was a Sri Lankan called Kumar from Karainagar. Karainagar is a Northern town in Sri Lanka, and I am from Galle, in the South. While waiting for a fried egg, Kumar told me how their family used to do farming in their 15 acre land before the war broke out. Then the family was scattered. Now they live in Australia, Canada, and the UK. My story became dwarfed in the likely story of Kumar to lose everything fleeing a war zone without knowing if they would meet as a family in one country.
We sometimes encounter fire, storms, tsunamis, floods, wars, and other disturbances in life. We survive and then build new lives. Like in Ernest Hemmingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”, all what we end up having is a story of a struggle that changed us. We relive memories and look forward to a more stable future for us and for the young ones. In this journey, it is very important to know where to anchor the search for happiness. Outside things do not have any capacity to make us feel happy or sad. It is what we make out of them in our own mind that makes us feel sad or happy. So, it is important to spend time to nurture our own outlook of what is important in life. It is totally all right to use things that can be burned or washed away. We should take good care of them and be grateful to them for being of good use. But we should stay ready to say goodbye to them when natural forces overtake us. There is no price tag to what fire cannot burn in our own hearts. So, we should not compromise relationships for material things that can leave us at any moment. We should cherish communities, friendships, and brotherhood across borders. The Worcester Park fire and many other catastrophes have told us that humanity stands tall and strong when natural disasters reduce our precious belongings to rubble.
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