Something as everyday as dryer lint can be, and likely was, deadly
by Jacquelyn Mitchard

It was the night that I left the dishwasher on when I went to bed, and then for some reason the next morning, the kitchen floor looked like "Victory at Sea."

Thinking about that was what reminded me.

Of the dryer-lint story.

The story I wanted to write about, and put off because I couldn't figure out how.

And of Julia Kathan, a good neighbor, who suggested it.

Now nearly a year ago, I got one of those letters writer dread - a long, LONG letter asking me to do something obscure.  In this case, it was to write a story about a fire that might have been caused by lint from a clothes dryer.

Not lint in the little thing you bang against the wastepaper basket before you put in another load.  Lint in the pipe in the wall.  The flexy white pipe that bents straight outside if you live in a newer house.  But if you live in an older house, before 1960, it might snake through layers of walls and floors before reaching the outside air.

I didn't know that, nearly a year ago.  I didn't read the whole letter at one sitting.  I put it aside, intending to get back to it, until the night the dishwasher flooded the floor, doing its silent work, with just a tiny flaw, while we slept.

All I had to do was mop.  Nobody ever died of a wet kitchen floor.

But all I could think of was the letter.

A long time ago, now nearly a year ago, a family of five in an affluent suburb of Milwaukee died in their beds as a fire ignited that buildup of the harmless fluff of socks and towel threads.

Even if the dryer was in use only before the Goldmans fell asleep, the fire that began smoldered undetected for hours, probably killing the family with deadly fumes they never realized they breathed - long before the neighbors awoke on Halloween morning, to see a ruin where a tidy family house had stood.

The damage was so horrific that fire investigators could never officially determine the cause, not enough to place any blame on the manufacturers of the appliance of the builder of the house.  Many of them, Julia Kathan says, suspected the within- the-walls source because the point of generation and the lack of the family's response.

"The garage door had burned away" Julia Kathan wrote to me.  "We could see both their cars neatly parked.  We knew immediately that our neighbors were probably dead."

The youngest child of Joy and Doug Goldman was only 3.

Write about this, Julia Kathan told me in her letter - her first and her second.  Write about what happened so that no other family ever has to die because of something so silly you can't even figure out a way to make it sound important enough to write about.  Write about it, she urged me in the winter, in the spring.

Write about just a few things.  

The few things are these, just in case:

There are two kinds of smoke detectors.

There's the ionizing kind - the kind that most people have.  They cost about $6, and they're great for detecting hot, fast fires.  Then there's the other kind, called the photoelectric.  It can detect the slow fire, the kind that killed the Goldman family, the kind the ionizing detector would have missed.

A photoelectric smoke detector costs about $10 more than an ionizing smoke detector.  There's probably no reason most houses shouldn't have both kinds.

Here's the second thing:

Appliances start fires all the time.  The kinds of fires appliances like dryers start aren't the kind that fill the house with instant smoke and set off all the seven honking alarms people like me feel secure in having on all three levels.

The kind of fire that killed the Goldmans started low, and slow.  There was no sound, no dramatic, oxygen-stoked orange warning.  Steadily, inside the walls, the lint burned.  Carbon monoxide filled the house.  Smoke filled the house.  At first, no one was sure whether there was a carbon monoxide detector in the house, though Doug Goldman had told a co-worker to remember to get one for her house just the week before.  A detector was later found at the fire site.

Appliances, with bad wiring or outmoded or blocked venting systems, start fires all the time, but usually someone notices a smell or a spark.

If a family's asleep or gone, there's no one to notice.

No one is sure, but perhaps the Goldmans did what I have done a hundred times: tried to get two things done at once.  Washed a load of towels and threw them in the dryer before they turned in at night.  My friend Linda used to tell me, when I complained that my husband wouldn't agree to buy a dishwasher, that the most wonderful sound to fall asleep to is the sound of  a dishwasher, doing your work for you.

But I don't think that now.

I think it's probably best to fall asleep to the silence of appliances retired for the night.  Probably best to set off to soccer games or on day trips and leave the housework until later.  Another acquaintance of Julia Kathan's lost a house in the same way as the Goldmans lost their lives.  When the fire started, the whole family (thankfully) was at a sporting event.

Here's the last thing:

How many of us are even aware of the route and condition of our furnace venting or our clothes dryers?  How many of us would even know how to look?

The local power company in the city will gladly give out free advice on how to check those things out, for the price of a phone call. So will various fire and safety departments.  They'd much rather interrupt their day to walk you through a warning then to walk through your house searching for survivors.

Those three things:

1. The right kind of fire detection devices
2. Appliances turned off at night or in the absence of the family.
3. A check on the condition and reliability of appliance vents.

Three things.  Perhaps three phone calls.  Perhaps, counting a visit by a handyman and reading this column, a total of three hours' time spent.

I won't forget.

Julia Kathan didn't forge.  She kept at me.  She was a good neighbor - to the memory of her friend, to me , and to you.

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