When Kayla and Nathan Dahl got Covid-19, they knew that recovering might be hard, but they had no idea that one of the symptoms could cost them their lives.
As everyone knows by now, many people who are infected by the new coronavirus suffer from loss of smell and taste. This symptom might sound meaningless to some, but it almost proved fatal for a family of seven in Texas.
Kayla and Nathan were recovering from Covid-19, and they had lost their sense of smell, so, when a fire started in their house, they couldn’t smell the smoke.
It all started one night when four of their children were sleeping in their bedrooms, while 2-year-old Brandon was sleeping in the living room. He was not feeling well, so they put him to sleep there because it was closer to their bedroom and they could monitor him more easily.
At 4:30 am, Brandon entered his parents’ bedroom and started tapping on his mom’s feet coughing and saying: “Mama, hot”!
When the couple woke up, they realized that their house was on fire. The living room was fully engulfed by flames, while there was smoke everywhere.
Weirdly enough, although there were two fire detectors in the house, none of them went off.
Nathan, a volunteer firefighter himself, knew exactly what to do in a situation like that, and, thankfully, he had also trained his family in case of emergency.
So, within thirty seconds, the whole family was safely outside.
While Kayla was calling 911, Nathan helped the children out of the burning house. It was a miracle how they all made it out of there alive when all of the property was destroyed.
Both the house and the couple’s vehicles were burnt, but what really matters is that nobody was injured.
“Everything is gone. We lost my car. Everything inside the house,” Kayla Dahl told Good Morning America. “Brandon saved us. He was wrapped in God’s arms to help protect him and to make sure that our entire family was able to get out.”
Kayla explained how it feels to lose everything.
“You hear people say ‘I lost everything’, and you don’t realize the weight of that until it happens to you.”
In USA alone, there were more than 1.2 million fires in 2019, resulting in more than 3k deaths and more than 16.6k injuries. Of those fires, more than 350k were house fires, the majority of which were related to cooking.
It is important to know what to do in case a fire starts in a building. This way, lives can be saved. The most important thing to remember is that you should get out of the burning building as quickly as possible. It is crucial to not open doors that are close to the touch, and to make sure you get low and go under the smoke if you have to escape through it.
Always have a family communication plan, just like this family. Thanks to the toddler’s warning and to the emergency plan they already had, they survived a catastrophic house fire.
Watch Brandon’s parents talk about his heroic deed in the video below.
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