BATON ROUGE — Louisiana State University student Cayden Anderson never imagined that preparing for his senior year would mean picking up the pieces of his life that were destroyed by fire, soot, and water.
Anderson went to get dinner on July 20, and when he returned to his apartment around 10:30 p.m., he heard fire alarms going off and smelled smoke. He called the fire department and drove around the complex, assuming his apartment was safe because he knew he didn’t leave the stove on, didn’t have candles burning, and no one was home.
When he didn’t see anything, he headed home and went inside to double-check the oven was off and no one else was there. That’s when he remembered he just got a new window air conditioning unit.
“I ran up to my room, and the second story was already filled with smoke,” Anderson described. “My door was basically black and the doorknob was hot. I opened the door, and my carpet and part of my bed was on fire. It’s a miracle I wasn’t there. I happened to leave for 10 minutes.”
Help Cayden get back on his feet
Anderson ran downstairs, grabbed a fire extinguisher, and put out the flames. After getting some fresh air on the balcony, he ran back in and put out more flames. At that point, the fire extinguisher was empty, so he went downstairs to wait for the fire department to arrive.
“Then my neighbor came out and I borrowed his fire extinguisher,” he said. “I went back upstairs, put out more flames, and the fire department got there just as I was emptying that extinguisher.”
At that point, Anderson had just finished putting out more flames on the floor, when he realized there was a fire in the AC unit above his room. “The firefighters came in and they ripped up ceiling and confirmed, in the fire report, they wrote that it was a mechanical failure in the HVAC unit.”
An hour and a half later, Anderson was able to go back into his room.
“Everything was either soaking wet, covered in soot or burned,” he said. Anderson is now living in a temporary unit until complex management is able to find a permanent place for him.
The clean-up
Since then, he and his family have been working nonstop to clean everything up and search for anything salvageable. “Whatever wasn’t burned was either stained black and covered in soot or soaked by water,” he said. “They had two fire hoses pumping in my room for 30 minutes. And it was an electrical fire, so the foam they use from those specific fire extinguishers stains stuff.”
The day after the fire, Anderson stepped on something while clearing debris, an injury that sent him to the hospital.
“I ended up stepping on a rusty nail and had to get a tetanus shot,” he said. “Today’s actually a week after we started cleaning, and it’s the first day that my fingertips aren’t black from touching all that stuff.”
Anderson and his family have spent a lot of time at laundromats trying to get the smell of smoke out of his clothes that weren’t destroyed. He’s renting a storage unit for all of his burned items, so he can eventually look at them and see if things can be cleaned or put back together.
On top of everything, Anderson also lost most of school supplies, just a month before his senior year starts. “One of the big things I lost was my laptop,” he said. “My backpack was burned. I use an iPad a lot for school, and that’s not in the best shape, however it does turn on. Notebooks, pens, pencils, those are gone.”
How to help
When the fire happened, Anderson didn’t have renters insurance. Something he, and his brother who’s about to be renting, now have. “Buy renters insurance. It’s so cheap. I had no idea,” he said.
Anderson, an engineering student focusing on cybersecurity, is now trying to get everything he needs for his classes ahead of the fall semester in August. He’s set up a GoFundMe for anyone who is able to donate to him and help him rebuild.
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