Dealing With Disaster

[mmoon]

Glad to hear you are all okay. Sounds terrifying. Hard to know what any of us would do in the same situation, but your fast actions paid off.
We had a somewhat similar situation as your insurance, except the bank screwed up our automatic mortgage payment and we were out of the country for awhile, so didn't find out until it was a dire situation with all kinds of penalties and threats. The only thing that saved us from a huge mess was that we knew someone on the inside who worked at the company and helped us straighten it out. Anyone on Baexpats have a connection here?

I hate to be the one to say if, but depending on your losses, it might not be worth it to get into a long fight. With the insurance technically lapsed, the company will probably just throw their hands up. Corporations don't tend to have a lot of compassion when it's time to pay up.

Your daughter sounds like a real rock star.

I've just replaced the battery in my smoke alarm...

 

[wineguy999]

Glad everyone is safe, and your words should give us all a wake-up call to be prepared.

 

[jeff1234]

Queso; I, too, am glad you had only minor damage.
Question: what woke you up and alerted you to the fire?

 

[nativexpat]

Sorry to hear about the fire. Glad you are ok. Is there anything we can do to help?

 

[Bajo_cero2]

Great that you are all ok.
Don't trust that electrician, he works for whom has to pay the damages.

 

[ElQueso]

I am glad to hear both you and the family are ok. I am not quite sure why you stayed to fight the flames instead of running out and scream just so neighbors would call the firemen... I think staying inside was a dangerous choice, and that maybe firemen and ambulances would have come faster. Then again, you never know how you will react under that kind of stress. I have been in a fire myself while on vacation outside of the city. I remember that after putting out the fire, the firemen returned hours after that to investigate what had caused it. ( it was a gas accident ). Hospital Rivadavia probably checked your kids first and when they verified they were out of danger and knew they had private insurance, sent them to HA ( to save resources to use on people that have no insurance ). Anyway, it all sounds very scary, and I am glad it was just some material damage.

The firemen couldn't have been called or have come any faster. My wife and two youngest were outside as fast as me and our oldest could have been and the first thing they did was to get someone to call the firemen. If I had waited for the firemen to get there without doing anything myself, the fire could very well have spread beyond the kitchen and the disaster at that point would have been pretty much total. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do to protect your property and that of those who you are contracted to, not to mention innocents above and below. Obviously not at the unthinking cost of life, just throwing them away stupidly, but I made a snap decision, with all other variables taken into account (wife and young ones out of house, fire not having gone too far yet, what was to come without action, etc) and it paid off in the end. That pretty much sums up life, to me

I figured Rivadavia probably sent them on their way because they could. I just think it's pretty crappy that 1 - I couldn't have our girls sent where I wanted them to go and 2 - that once they are there they had to lie about something so idiotic and couldn't just say exactly that - hey, you have insurance, you're not in any immediate danger, and we'll send you where your family wanted you to go to begin with.

 

[Girino]

So sorry for what happened. Regarding the ambulance detour, I was told by my insurance (Hospital Italiano) that if you call 911 you get taken to a public hospital first and them if you are not critical you can be moved to your hospital of choice within your health insurer network.

It makes sense, since an ambulance is not a remis taking you wherever you want to, and I think that the principle of being assessed by an unbiased physician sounds fair to me.... though in practice it turned out your children were sent to the nearest hellhole.

Hospital Italiano in Almagro is a 40' drive from my home (with no traffic), so I can see why no public service ambulance would drive me all that way - I'd keep busy a public emergency service and if I am in urgent need of care 40 mins is an awful lot of time. I think what should happen per procedure is that once you are deemed to be in non-critical state, you can call your own insurance ambulance to be taken to the hospital of your choice (this might take a while).

 

[ElQueso]

Queso; I, too, am glad you had only minor damage.
Question: what woke you up and alerted you to the fire?

Personally, it was the fan in our bedroom shutting down as we lost electricity. I was in and out of sleep at the time, heard the click of our main fuse shutting off down the hall and the fan stopped. As I was getting out of bed, I heard our youngest, whose room is much closer to the kitchen, running down the hall screaming "the house is on fire!" She'd been awakened by the smell of smoke.

 

[thorsten]

Glad to hear that you and your family are OK ElQueso. Obviously what follows w.r.t. repairs/insurance/etc. is a pain, but in the end nobody got seriously harmed which is the most important thing and you learned a lot about your brave daughter.

 

[ElQueso]

So sorry for what happened. Regarding the ambulance detour, I was told by my insurance (Hospital Italiano) that if you call 911 you get taken to a public hospital first and them if you are not critical you can be moved to your hospital of choice within your health insurer network.

It makes sense, since an ambulance is not a remis taking you wherever you want to, and I think that the principle of being assessed by an unbiased physician sounds fair to me.... though in practice it turned out your children were sent to the nearest hellhole.

Hospital Italiano in Almagro is a 40' drive from my home (with no traffic), so I can see why no public service ambulance would drive me all that way - I'd keep busy a public emergency service and if I am in urgent need of care 40 mins is an awful lot of time. I think what should happen per procedure is that once you are deemed to be in non-critical state, you can call your own insurance ambulance to be taken to the hospital of your choice (this might take a while).

Yeah, I figured it was something like that too, why they wanted to go to Rivadavia. One of the big reasons I didn't argue with the EMTs and waste time on trying to get them to HA si o si because I would have been arguing for nothing in the end. Although I would have been happy to pay the ambulance charges anyway.

What really frustrated me was that they had to come up with some bizarre reason/excuse/lie as to why they couldn't be treated. Although my other prior experience with a public hospital (not as a patient, but visiting my wife's brother's wife, her sister-in-law, while she was giving birth) makes me wonder if some of what they told her was in fact true. When a pregnant woman has to walk 5 flights of stairs because none of the elevators work and there are no gurney attendants to help at night...well, in my mind anything could go.

BTW - HA is much closer to us than Rivadavia, which is about twice or more the distance.