A heavily pregnant mother and her family have been left homeless after their house was destroyed in a fire started by an electronic bike charger.
Kelly Bottomley’s four-bedroom council semi went up in flames after the vehicle set on fire while it was on charge. Luckily Kelly, 42, was at work but her children Paige, 20, and Joshua, 17, were in the property with Paige’s boyfriend Kane Rushton, 21, and family friend Emily Barnett, 23.
The family have been forced to ‘jump from hotel to hotel’ as the council are struggling to find a house for them, even though Kelly will be induced in two weeks.
Paige said: “The council are trying to look for a property for us but there is quite a lot of us, so we are jumping from hotel to hotel at the minute. There isn’t any hotels available at the moment so we’ve been put in an Airbnb but we don’t know where we will be staying at the end of the week.
“It’s exhausting – we are so fed up. My mum is pregnant and she will be induced in two weeks, but we have nowhere to set up for the baby. Living out of carrier bags isn’t nice and I think we need to start rebuilding our lives because at the moment we feel stuck and like we are in limbo. We are just hoping that something will pop up for us soon as we are very exhausted and very fed up.”
The family say it took just 20 minutes for the fire to rip through the house on April 6 and now everything is destroyed including the staircase and all of the upstairs.
Paige said: “The house was just a complete loss – everything including our personal items, electronics, clothes and pictures have gone. I think it took just 20 minutes for the house to be destroyed and I believe they are talking about knocking it down.
“The complete top floor is destroyed – all of the staircase has just gone so you can’t access the top floor at all. All of the floors had fallen through and it looks like even the walls have even melted.”
Kelly left the house around 30 minutes before the fire started but Kane thought she was still in the property, so went to rescue her. Around 65 per cent of his body is now burnt and he’s now got ‘quite a long recovery process’ before he will be allowed to come back home.
Paige said: “My partner is still in hospital, he only came out of the ICU a couple of days ago. Before that, he was confused and 65% of his body is burnt.
“He’s having surgery for his second skin graft so he’s got quite a long recovery process to go through. We had celebrated his birthday on the Friday, the fire was the Saturday morning and his birthday was the Sunday so we celebrated it while he was on a ventilator.”
Paige and Kane’s pet German Shepherd, Leo, was in the house at the time of the fire but hasn’t been seen since. However fire fighters didn’t find any animal remains in the property so instead believe he escaped the fire.
Paige, of Wakefield, West Yorkshire. said: “We still can’t find him but the fire fighters said they couldn’t find any remains. A lot of people are on the look for him because he must have got out of the house. We’ve had one sighting in Doncaster that does resemble his markings but nobody has been able to go to the dog to see if it is him.
“We just really want him found – Kane got me him for my 18th birthday. It’s just heart-breaking because we want him found before Kane comes out of hospital. He wasn’t aware that my mum was at work – he just thought that he needed to get her and the baby safe. We were so happy when we realised she was at work because she wouldn’t have been able to get out of the window.”
The family are still waiting for the fire service to confirm the exact cause of the blaze, but it’s believed it was caused by an e-bike that was on charge. They are now warning people to keep the vehicles outside the house, especially when they are on charge.
Kelly said: “People should keep their e-bikes outside of the house, they should be outside. We’ve obviously never had any problems with it but knowing what we know now, then we are telling people to keep them out of the house. If you can charge them in an open area, then that would be a bit more safer than charging it inside. We had no clue that it could do stuff like this.”
