We’ve had distressing news from the moominbeach that a life-long friend and neighbor’s cabin/house caught fire yesterday. The good news is that NO ONE WAS INJURED but it did suffer an as yet undetermined amount of interior damage. I am not going to say much more about this. For one thing I have no details. For another, although I don’t think they know I am a blahgger, I am sure they are devastated by this event and I want to respect their privacy.

What I am going to take away from this is that our own moomincabin desperately needs a better emergency exit strategy from the upper story. Currently the only way to get up and down is a “ladder” in the interior of the structure. It was not built to code and we all regard it as dangerous. My parents bought rope ladders but I can’t feature anyone trying to figure out how to properly secure and deploy one in an emergency situation especially in the middle of the night.

Another important issue can be seen from this picture I took from the moomincabin deck. The building you can see across the lot is the Old Cabin. It is one of the original three log cabins my granddaddy and two of his friends had built 100 years ago. See all those trees between us? Our property is in a forest and it is very dry this spring. If a house fire ever gets out of control you can guess what might happen next. There is plenty of tinder there in the form of a blanket of dried out pine needles and twigs. I know because I used to have to collect tinder to start wood fires in the moomincabin when we still had a wood stove. A forest fire is a nightmare generations of moominbeach kiddos have had. THANK YOU to the volunteer fire crews who got this fire under control🙏

All we can do to prevent a forest fire is continue to be extremely careful. But maybe it’s time to get SERIOUS about having a sturdy outdoor staircase built at the moomincabin to allow easy exit from the upstairs. We’ve been talking about it for years now. It’s time for action.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 27th, 2024 at 6:27 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.