Post-Fire: Week 1
First, I want to send out my thanks to the many friends, customers, and students who have reached out to us, made purchases, offered labor or materials, and provided us with much-needed moral support. Here is the latest.
Fire Inspectors (both from the Fire Marshal’s Office and the Insurance Examiner) have concluded their investigations. One says “cause undetermined”, the other “spontaneous combustion”, and I say “no idea”. There were no ignition sources in the workshop and electrical issues were ruled out, so I keep coming back to a fire-sign (me) and dragon (me) plus incense (almost pure fire) equals the occasional burst of flame. I’ve been in this business since 1995 and this is the only fire, so I remain hopeful we’ll never have to deal with another.
We’ve been allowed back into the building, but there is virtually nothing left. We’ve found a couple of things that could be salvaged, but very little. The attic space came down on top of everything else, and the fire was extremely hot, so most of the workshop was simply transformed into ash or charcoal. On the positive side, we’ve actually found a few intact incense ingredients. It’s mostly been dragon’s blood, but we’ve found a few others as well. As soon as we have power again, I plan to create a new incense blend from the material we’ve saved. “Rising from the ashes” is the working name, but we’ll see what the final scent is before choosing a name. It feels right to me to make incense from the rubble to rebuild the coffers for the next version of The Incense Dragon. Luckily, many of our workshop’s incense molds survived, so once power is restored I’ll start cranking it out.
We’ve been very fortunate that one of our neighbors has a small apartment attached to their house and they’re letting us stay there. Electrical work to separate the house from the workshop isn’t scheduled until March 29th (happy birthday to me…) and it will likely be a few days beyond that before the meter is reinstalled. Once power is restored, we are ready to start shipping as many orders as we can fill. Replacement inventory is screaming into the house at top speed, but I still no ETA as to when “normal” work will resume.
Finally, I have to send out a huge thank you to the folks at Shoyeido Incense. I wrote to the after the fire and showed them what remained of an incense making set they had sent me 20 years ago. I’d written to thank them again and tell them how sorry I was that the set was destroyed. Those set haven’t been available for many years, and most of the Shoyeido America employees had never even seen one. Somehow, they located a completed replacement set and shipped it to me. That’s definitely been the high-point of my incense world in the last week. Thank you Shoyeido!!
