Food Editor Terryl Gavre has now given us the best excuse we’ve heard yet for missing a deadline. She and her partner Sam Wood had been on an errand five minutes from home when her cell phone rang. It was a neighbor reporting their home alarm was blaring. The couple zoomed home. “I was pretty stressed because I know I didn’t set the burgler alarm so it had to be the smoke alarms,” Gavre says.

She was right.

“When we entered through the garage door the whole house was filled with smoke. I immediately backed the van out of the driveway and took the kids over to the neighbors, then ran back over to Sam. We used fire extinguishers that I bought when I opened the new restaurant to put out the fire. It was upstairs in a guest bathroom. A ceiling fan for shower steam had shorted out and caught the ceiling on fire. The burning fan then dropped out and started the carpeting and walls. The toilet shattered from the heat.

“It was really a shocker,” Gavre continues. “The fire department came and finished it off. They cut a few holes in the ceiling to make sure it was out and then checked the rest of the upstairs for embers. They told me that if we hadn’t got home and put it out that it would have burned most of the house down by the time they got there.”

Gavre is grateful for the happy ending.

“It was an eye-opener,” Gavre says. “I learned that I was totally unprepared for an emergency. Other than the extinguishers, which was key, I wasn’t prepared. The electricity goes out when there’s a fire so the house was pitchdark. Our flashlights were all either lost or had dead batteries since our daughter loves to play with them. Our alarm company never called us or the fire department because I had not signed up for the service linking them to the smoke alarms.”

Gavre is now advising friends not to leave lights or fans on for long periods of time when away and to replace burned out bulbs immediately because even if the bulb is out, electricity still goes to the lamp. She also urges exchanging cell phone numbers with neighbors, calling the fire department immediately even if it seems like a false alarm, having working flashlights and fire extinguishers handy and getting an escape ladder for second-floor rooms.