Rānui house fire: Family lucky to be alive after freak laundry ‘spontaneous combustion’

An Auckland woman says her family are lucky to be alive after a pile of clothes caught fire in her home in a freak accident.

Zephr Brennan, 24, and her family were asleep late on Saturday night at her Rānui home when she was woken up “in a panic” by firefighters trying to break her door down.

A fire had started in the laundry room of her two-storey townhouse on Metcalfe Rd, causing smoke to fill the whole house.

Fire and Emergency New Zealand said crews were notified of the fire just after 11pm.

“Crews worked to bring the fire, which was an apartment block, under control.

“A specialist fire investigator attended. The cause of the fire was accidental, having started in the laundry.”

Brennan said neighbours called emergency services after a fire alarm went off and smoke started seeping out of the house.

“A fire alarm was going off. It wasn’t waking us up for some reason ... We woke up in the middle of the night to the fire brigade trying to break our door down.”

She was with her fiancé and 4-month-old baby at the time and immediately ran to check on her son in the other room.

“I woke up in a panic hearing the banging, seeing the smoke outside. I immediately ran into my oldest son’s room.

“My lungs are already starting to burn. I open the door to my son’s room and more smoke billows out. Unfortunately, he is huddled underneath a blanket trying to breathe into a pillow, crying and coughing in the corner. And so all panic just rises in everyone at that point. I’m screaming at my fiancé to get our baby and I’m grabbing my 4-year-old.”

The aftermath of a fire in Rānui after a pile of clothes went up in flames.

Brennan and her family huddled together next to a “little gap in a window” in her son’s room to try to breathe fresh air.

“We had to stay like that for I think about five-10 minutes until the door successfully got broken down and we all got rushed down, crawling down our stairs under the smoke and outside. It was really insane.”

Brennan said it was “absolutely terrifying” for her and her family.

“We didn’t know if we were going to have to smash down a window. We didn’t know if we were going to make it out alive. We couldn’t tell how big the fire was.

“It was frankly the scariest moment of our lives. We were scared that our sons would pass out from carbon monoxide poisoning because there was so much smoke. We were all inhaling it.”

She was told by the investigator that the fire started through “spontaneous combustion of oils and static electricity”.

“Oxidation of oils on clothes apparently can cause spontaneous combustion when they’re in a pile. And so it started at the bottom of this pile of clothes that we were going to do washing for the next day.

“Thankfully, our laundry room door was closed, so the fire for the most part was just contained to that area, until it started spreading and the smoke started filling the whole house.”

Brennan and her family were taken to hospital to get tested for carbon monoxide poisoning, but she said everyone was fine, albeit “still really shaken up”.

“If our neighbour hadn’t actually noticed and called it in, we probably wouldn’t be here. We lost our home, we lost a lot of clothes, we lost a bunch of other things that we just can’t get back.

“Thankfully, we’ve been moved to a transitional house, [an] apartment in Avondale so we can slowly start to repair and rebuild from there. We’re very grateful to the community that’s helped us out and gotten us supplies. We’re just really shaken up and stressed about the days to come.”