Could your fridge burn your house down?
You can’t switched them off. They're packed with inflammable insulation that can give off toxic gas. Meet the most dangerous appliance of all....
WHEN fire ripped through Noel Davies’s home last year leaving him with nothing but the clothes he was wearing, there was one small crumb of comfort: neither he nor his two children were inside at the time.
Noel had set off for his work as a project manager that Monday morning, while his ten- year- old daughter Molly and son Shea, six, were on holiday with their mother, from whom he is separated.
‘The fire ripped through the house destroying everything in its wake,’ says Noel, 39.
‘All the things I’d worked so hard to provide — our furniture, every item of clothing in the drawers and wardrobes, precious photographs, even the bathroom suite — were gone.
‘I’ll never forget my little boy spotting his lovely red bed in the skip and sobbing at the charred state of it.’
So where did this rampant blaze start? Noel’s fridge-freezer, said firefighters. Indeed, this most basic of household appliances is where many house fires start every year. Fires involving fridges and freezers are regular occurances and have led to serious injuries — and even deaths.
These include 36-year-old Santosh Benjamin-Muthiah in England, who managed to save his daughters — aged three and three months — by passing them through a first-floor window of their London home to neighbours before succumbing to the fumes.
His wife, paediatrician Dr Jennifer Benjamin, spent two weeks in a coma following the fire in November 2010 which was sparked by a defective defrost timer on their fridge-freezer.
Between 2005 to 2014 there were 326 fatal fires in Ireland. Some 17 per cent were believed to originate in the kitchen and 18 per cent of the fires originated with an electrical appliance, according to statistics gathered by the Department of the Environment.
In Britain, from January 2011 to March 2014, 855 fires were reported to have been started by fridge-freezers, accounting for 7 per cent of fires caused by electrical products. Not all blazes are due to faults in the appliances. Faulty wiring, incorrect installation or adjustment and lack of proper maintenance can lead to fires, too. Fire services are now lobbying the industry to make these ‘most dangerous of all household appliances’ more fire resistant by replacing some of the more flammable materials found in them.
Although other domestic appliances can ignite — with the Irish Daily Mail previously highlighting the dangers of washing machines left running overnight or when owners are out during the day — the fire brigade says that fridge-freezers pose a particular danger.
This is because they contain large amounts of plastic and a highly-flammable insulation which, when ignited, causes fires that spread quickly, giving off toxic gases.
Although doors and side panels of most fridge-freezers are covered with metal, many manufacturers still use flammable plastic backing, which offers little protection against the insulation catching fire. Add to that the fact that the usual precautions of switching appliances off at the plug at night and before leaving home are impossible when it comes to fridge-freezers, which must be on at all times to be effective, and you have a potentially lethal mix.
Noel Davies had bought his dormer bungalow a year before the fire after splitting with his wife, with whom he shared custody of the children. Noel’s mother called round to drop off dry cleaning and saw the kitchen ablaze.
Thanks to her quick action, firefighters were able to stop it spreading to the house next door. The local
‘My children could have been
asleep in bed’
fire brigade was later reported as say ing it believed the blaze had started in the fridge-freezer, but couldn’t tell if the appliance was faulty as it was too badly damaged.
But Noel’s house was ruined — and because his insurance had lapsed, he had to sleep in a friend’s spare room. On the half of the week he had cus tody of his children, they’d join him.
‘It was a terrible few months,’ says Noel. ‘I tried to put a brave face on it for the children, but I lost a lot of weight. The upheaval was unsettling for all three of us and I was haunted by what could have happened if we’d been asleep in bed when the fire started. Losing all our possessions was hard, but the thought I could have lost my children was unbearable.
‘We moved back in four months ago, but it’s taken until now for my son to feel confident enough to sleep in his own bed at night, and not with me.’
Noel bought the appliance secondhand on the Gumtree classifieds website early last year.
So after the fire he took advice from legal firm Leigh Day, where solicitor Jill Paterson, who specialises in product liability, lodged a claim against Beko for compensation for uninsured losses, distress and inconvenience.
Beko settled last December, paying Noel a six-figure sum in compensation, but without admitting liability.
A spokesperson for the electrical company told us: ‘We were sorry to hear of this incident. We are continuing to investigate the history of the product, which was bought secondhand, and have passed details to Trading Standards who have been attempting to trace the market trader who sold the product.
‘We would urge anyone buying a product second-hand to check the history of their product and speak to the appropriate manufacturer if they have any concerns.’ A fridge-freezer fire was also the starting point for the blaze that swept through Annemarie and Thomas Menzies’s house in January, 2013. Mercifully, the couple, and their four children, got out alive.
Thomas, 44, was woken at 5.30am by what sounded like running water in the kitchen of their bungalow.
On opening the kitchen door, he was beaten back by huge flames and choking black smoke. Only then did the smoke alarm trigger. ‘I was still in our bedroom and heard Thomas shouting: “Annie, there’s a fire — get out! Get the kids out!”’ says his wife.
As Thomas tried to dampen the flames, their eldest son Sean, then 18, heroically lifted his sisters, Bethany and Leah, who were eight and six, from their beds and carried them, one under each arm, out of the house. Younger son, Thomas, then 13, was woken by the alarm and also escaped. His father was given oxygen for smoke inhalation by paramedics.
‘I daren’t allow myself to think what might have happened if Thomas hadn’t been woken by the sound of the flames,’ says Annemarie, 39. ‘We could have all died in our beds.’
It is thought that the Menzies’ frost-free fridge-freezer was a model recalled by Beko in 2011 after a fault was identified. However, as the couple had missed the media coverage, and a letter informing them would have been sent to an old address, they weren’t aware of any issue with their appliance’s thermostat.
Beko has not confirmed if the Menzies family’s fridge-freezer had been recalled, but have separately told us that tracing products during a recall is a challenge.
A spokesman added: ‘ Due to extensive effort, Beko has had a higher than average rate of success during product recalls — in the case of fridge-freezers we believe that 84 per cent of affected products have been modified or are no longer in the market.’
The Menzies, whose kitchen was gutted, also had no insurance so Thomas, a carer, took legal advice. It was never established what caused the fire in the fridge-freezer. Without accepting liability, Beko paid the Menzies family €2,050.
But their ordeal has left psychological scars. ‘ Seeing the kitchen all charred was a constant reminder of the terror we all felt that morning,’ says Annemarie.
‘Thomas and I swapped bedrooms with the girls soon afterwards because they were finding it hard to sleep and wanted to be as far away as possible from the kitchen.’
But for families wanting to avoid a similar risk, it’s not as simple as deciding not to buy certain brands as many use components produced by the same manufacturers in their machines. Of the 855 fridge-freezer fires recorded by the fire and rescue services in Britain, more than a quarter of the appliances were so badly damaged it was impossible to determine their make.
But the identifiable brands involved include Beko, Hotpoint, Indesit, Bosch, Electrolux, Philips, Lec, Candy, Zanussi and Samsung.
Statistically, because of numbers sold, firefighters expect best-selling brands, such as Beko and Hotpoint, cropping up more frequently in their investigations. But Beko says its appliances are responsible f or proportionally f ewer f i res than the norm.
Peter Dartford, president of the Chief Fire Officers’ Association, says that unless an appliance is obviously malfunctioning, it’s impossible for families to anticipate a fault. Another major issue is the system manufacturers’ use for informing consumers of potential problems, he says.
Instead of details being recorded at the point of purchase, companies rely on customers completing and returning registration forms with their contact details — and telling them if they move or change telephone number.
‘This means that only 10 to 20 per cent of faulty electrical products are traced during a recall, which means there are a lot of potential fire r i sks out t here,’ says Mr Dartford. ‘There’s no reason why these records couldn’t be kept by retailers selling products.’
He recommends f i tting smoke alarms, testing them weekly and closing all internal doors before going to bed. This can contain a fire in one room for up to 30 minutes. Also, you should periodically check online to see if any of your electrical goods are subject to a recall.
Jennifer Beaumont is battling with the guilt she feels after a Hotpoint freezer she was storing at her mother’s home caught fire and destroyed the family farmhouse.
Mercifully, her 87-year-old mother, Maureen, was staying the night with one of Jennifer’s sisters when the blaze took hold this month. The fire was detected only when it spread to the neighbours’ house and the family was woken by the dog barking.The parents had to rescue their two young children from their beds.
Damage to both houses i s so extensive that they are uninhabitable and it’s likely to be a year before Jennifer’s mother can move back into the place she’s called home for more than 60 years. ‘It took them five hours to put out the fire,’ says 62-year-old Jennifer. ‘Mum said the most important thing is that everyone survived, but she’s devastated to have lost all of our old family photographs, and a treasured statue of the Pope.
‘Her neighbours told us it was terrifying walking through their smoke-filled house, trying to escape.’
The freezer had been stored at the house for two years, but Jennifer, who was planning to take it back after having her kitchen extended, switched it on three weeks ago, to check i t was working, which it appeared to be.
She went home, believing she had turned it off, and her mother went to stay with another daughter a few hours before the fire broke out.
Fire officer Sean Fearon, who helped extinguish the blaze, said he detected that the cause of the fire was the fridge-freezer after seeing tell-tale damage to the switch and motor, which had melted away.
‘People keep telling me I shouldn’t feel guilty because I had no reason to think there might be a problem and freezers are designed to be left turned on at all times,’ says Jennifer.
‘But I feel so bad about leaving it switched on because, if I hadn’t, my mother’s home, the place my siblings and I all grew up, would not have been destroyed. ‘In darker moments, of course, I also torment myself with thoughts about how much worse things could have been.’
A spokesman for Hotpoint told the Mail: ‘The most important thing to say is how sorry we are to hear about this incident. While it is unclear if this incident was caused by a fault with our fridge-freezer, we continually monitor the safety records of our appliances, and if we become aware of any potential issues with a product, we take immediate action to address the issue.
‘As the leading global manufacturer of appliances, quality and safety is our number one priority. As such, we have stringent measures throughout our production processes to ensure compliance with all regulatory requirements and optimum product safety. Incidences of this type are extremely rare and affect a very small number of our product sales.’
Of course, as Noel, Annemarie and Jennifer can testify, j ust a single incident can have a catastrophic effect on a family’s life.
‘It took them five hours to put
out the fire’ ‘We’ve lost the home where my family grew up’