This post may not be about green and frugal living, but I felt it was an important one to write.

Two nights ago friends of ours lost their home in a fire. The parents and all five children got out safely but the house is a complete loss, as is all of their possessions. Our community has rallied together so quickly and enthusiastically that, in less than 48 hours, the family is no longer in need of clothing donations nor do they need additional help replacing the kids’ sports equipment (it was a family of athletes). That’s pretty incredible.

What would have been pretty incredible as well was if the family had never found themselves in this situation in the first place.

It turns out that just before the fire began, someone in the house had cleaned out the fireplace and stored what were still-burning ashes in the garage. There must have been gasoline vapor in the garage, because that’s where the initial explosion occurred that caused the fire.

The dangers of working with hot embers is one of the first safety lessons that fire departments share with homeowners with fireplaces. The Connecticut Commission on Fire Prevention and Control had this to say about fireplace ashes: “Be sure to dispose of fireplace ashes in a closed metal container, away from your house. Ashes can retain their heat for hours, even days, and can cause nearby combustibles to ignite.”

I know that when we clean out our fireplace, we always do so days after we’ve last lit a fire. And when we do dump the ashes, we put them in a trash can in our backyard, away from anything that could catch fire. Our trash can is plastic, so I’m going to replace it with a metal one instead. My mother’s friends never made the plastic-to-metal switch, and stored some ashes in a bucket in their entrance hall one evening. When they came downstairs the next morning, the bucket had melted and the entrance-hall floor was scorched black. How that all never erupted into a fire is pretty much a miracle.

Besides storing ashes in metal, covered cans, here are some other fire-prevention safety tips to consider:

* Never close the flue or damper on a fireplace until you’re sure that the fire has died all the way down.

* Have your chimney cleaned professionally each year (we do it in fall) to avoid having any leftover debris in the chimney catch fire when you light one in the fireplace.

* If your power goes out and you must burn candles, put them on a steady, fire-proof base. That way if they tip over, they won’t cause a fire. We always place our power-outage candle stash on some large dinner plates before we light them.

* Also regarding candles, never burn them near draperies, rugs or other kinds of fabrics, like bedspreads. And never burn candles in a bedroom. Just like the danger of smoking in bed, something made of fabric could easily catch on fire when a candle tips over or someone drops a lit cigarette. In fact, the National Candle Association says that 40 percent of candle fires start in bedrooms. That doesn’t surprise me. When I was in high school, I knew a girl who loved to burn candles in her bedroom. One day, she left her bedroom with the candles burning, and one of her cats jumped off the bed to follow her out of the room. When the cat jumped down, he knocked over a candle, and within minutes her bedroom was filled with flames. She ended up burning down her whole house, from one stinking candle gone astray in her room.

It goes without saying that you should have working smoke detectors throughout your home. The National Fire Protection Association recommends that you have at least one smoke detector on every level of your home, including the basement, and a smoke detector outside each of the homes’ bedrooms. In our house, we have a smoke detector in the upstairs hall, where all of the bedrooms are clustered, plus one inside each of the four bedrooms. I’m guessing that our friends’ did, too, and that’s why even though they’d just put all of the kids to bed when the fire started in the garage, all seven of them were able to escape this fast-moving fire without anyone incurring any injuries.

Finally–and this isn’t about fire safety but more about protecting your financial assets–make sure that all of your insurance policies are up to date and sufficient to cover all of your belongings. As I mentioned this family we know lost everything in the fire, including their two cars. I also know that they had moved into this home about three years ago, and, at least at one point, must have had home-owner’s insurance, since you can’t get a mortgage if you don’t have proof of home-owner’s insurance. However, there’s no law that says that you have to maintain your home-owner’s insurance once you’re living in the house. I can only hope that they had been vigilant about keeping their insurance up to date so that as they go about replacing their lost possessions, they won’t have to incur any additional heartache involving money.

Our community is going to do whatever it can to help this family rebuild. In the meantime I’m going to confirm that all of my insurance policies are sufficient to cover our belongings, and that all of the smoke detectors in the house are, in fact, in working order. I’m going to go buy a new metal trash can to store our fireplace ashes, and I will make sure that we discuss a fire-exit plan with our kids on a regular basis–even have a fire drill from time to time. I hope that you will take similar precautions to protect your home and loved ones from the tragedy of a fire.