This time, I couldn’t think of a clever or playful title for my article. It’s a helluva way for us to start the new year.
We sometimes get drunk villagemen knocking on the door at midnight looking to buy cigarettes (at least, we don’t have alcohol). We ignore them and they call. So, as soon as we hear the knocking, we turn our phones off or down. The nights of 14 and 15 January were similar, except for a call from a village lady, which was unusual at that hour. My wife answered. She only understood “Car, fire!” The knocking continued more urgently with some shouting, and whistling. This was not the usual style. I changed into a dressing gown, put on some boots, and went outside.
More yells were heard, this time from a distance, and I could now see smoke and a glowing light coming from the garage. It must be a blaze… I felt my steel personal door. If a door is warm, you shouldn’t open it because the fire is large and you will add oxygen to it instantly. I opened the door, even though it was only warm. I used the padlock key, which I lock every night. I could see smoke billowing inside, but couldn’t tell where the fire was. I knew that the majority of fire deaths occur from smoke inhalation. I decided I couldn’t risk trying to open the big car doors from the inside and try to get out the 4×4. Anything in there could explode and all the smoke, including plastics, was waiting for me. I closed the door, told the seven Christian village volunteers to grab their passports and leave in case the house caught fire, called a neighbor, and went back to the house to gather some valuables before fleeing.
My wife called 112 to report the fire. She and I then left the guests with the neighbors. I returned to the scene and deposited my two small bags containing laptops, hard drives, wallets, passports, keys, and wallets.
Several more neighbors had gathered by now, some with shovels, to try and attack it with the snow. We had to keep both sets of doors closed to contain the flames, even though the windows were gone. The doors began to glow orange from the intense heat. The police arrived first, followed by the Mestia fire engine (an hour-and-a-half after we called 112). It was able draw water from a stream near the house and then pump it into the hoses. It doesn’t have a warm place to park in winter to stop the water from freezing. God help anyone with a housefire in the cold months, far from a source of water.
We told the men to move away from the garage because of the explosion risk, but they responded with jeers. The roof made of wood beams, corrugated steel sheets and galvanized sheets finally fell. The cement block walls remained intact. The firemen kept going. There were a variety of containers of gasoline, paint, diesel, and plastics. Also, there were two gas bottles and a generator with gasoline tanks. We watched in horror as it unfolded.
The police asked me to give a statement about possible causes and if I knew anyone who had a grudge against my. I replied that I knew no one and said nothing specific. They and the firefighters eventually left. But the latter came twice to check things out, and my wife rebuked the men because both times, the fire had re-started and I was trying with buckets of ice water to put it off. “We were frozen …”, they said. As if a warm home wasn’t waiting right here. She was right.
We were allowed to turn on the electricity in the house and then we all went to bed to try to get a few more hours of sleep.
The next morning, the light still steamed and smoked a little. The 4×4 was sitting on its wheel disks, completely burnt out. The walls were all black, except for the one where the electricity entered. It is unlikely that this was what caused the fire, even though it happens often. The inspectors from Zugdidi came up in the afternoon to poke and prod, take pictures, and ask lots questions. I did not leave anything running on garage electricity except for one radiator outside against the wall of my house where the incoming water is frozen. This radiator was running on minimum power, so it was ruled out. Are mice (who have chewed on paper in the glove compartment of the car) working on the electrical wires? Arson? All possibilities must be considered.
We were asked to go to the nearest police station, Becho, which is 12 km away. A kind neighbor who offered us any help drove me there. They entered our statements in the computer. The power went out before we could print the document and sign it. The police station generator consumes 5 GEL per hour and there was no fuel at the time. We mused about Svaneti‘s wonderful infrastructure and its backward steps in the twilight. We left, suggesting the police come and sign the document or ask any questions.
They were a great help in cleaning. This involved taking out everything movable from the garage and sorting. Roof sheets, half-burned wood beams and other miscellaneous items, scrap metal and garbage. We put all but the garbage in the barn and then took it to the dumpsters nearby. We all got dirty, but my neighbors had helped me reconnect water (which had entered the house via the garage) so that it wouldn’t freeze. We also had electricity to heat the water for showers. The whole experience brought us closer together than anything else could.
The last thing to do was to cover the top layer with weighted plastic to prevent snow from settling, melting, and refreezing, and causing further damage. After all the hard work, we can now relax and enjoy the fruits of our labor. The workbench and so many power tools were lost. The little things that survived brought us joy: a roofing tool, the wire baobab tree my stepsister had given us when we left her family after a Zimbabwe holiday. We are also grateful that the house and we were both physically unharmed: this could have all been so much worse. We will deal with the losses one at a time. God knows.
BLOG by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer is a writer and photographer who has been working for GT since 2011. He has lived in Georgia and Svaneti, respectively, since 1999. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with nearly 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
Read More @ georgiatoday.ge