This isn't electrical, but nevertheless provides a good illustration of why some people should not attempt any DIY!

WOW !!

Uhh....don't most people use an electric HEAT GUN and a spatula for this sort of thing?

I'm hoping nobody got killed...

That's a good one Paul!.
Lots of people have been caught out like that over here.
What can happen is, birds build nests in the space between floors or up in the roof void and fill the place up with straw and it's normally this that starts the fire.
60 Firemen?, must have been a big blaze!.
The guy is not wrong there.
Paul, I thought that terraced houses by law had to have a Fire Rated Party wall between them?.

Hey theres plenty of them about.. a chap where i used to live had to have his house under-pinned,, but thought he would to it him self..

as far as i am aware you carry this out at a meter at a time..

he dug up the lenght of his gable wall, then went to bed..

you've gussed it,, the side of his house fell down.. LOL!!

i mean what gets in some ones head to do that??????

That reminds me of an incident on one of the many (too many) DIY shows from a while back.

Some guy decided to dig out the ground under his floor to create extra living space in the form of a basement.

Yeah, you guessed it.... The supporting walls going down to the foundations just collapsed inward under the pressure and brought the whole house down, along with half of the adjoining one!

Heat from a torch can build up in non-obvious ways.

In a nearby city here, there was a would-be DIY plumber who recently lost his house to fire. The heat from his blow-torch cooked some wood such that it smoldered overnight.

Mike,
Yes, I think there are building regulations about party fire walls, fire stops in the attics of semi-detached shared houses (duplexes), and so on.

It's possible these were very old row houses without any such firebreaks.

Paul,
How would you feel, knowing that you had burnt down most of the houses in your street?, and for the sake of a bit of paint.
A local firefighter, that I know well, nearly lost his house to fire last year, for one of the dumbest, stupidest things.
He had been sanding down his newly lined and stopped walls and had the vacuum cleaner hooked up to the sander to minimise the dust spread, anyhow, as we all know, v/cleaners get very hot after they've been run for a few hours, non-stop and he just put it back in the cupboard and went to bed,
we had the fire under control by 0300, luckily the family escaped unhurt, but it wrecked the house (including the new walls).
Silly boy!.

NEWSFLASH!!.
A guy over here had his house blown to smithereens after he decided to install his own LPG cooker.
Luckily no-one was home at the time of the explosion, but I am told by one of the FF's that attended the ensuing fire, there are still bits of timber stuck in the rooves of the houses next door to the house!.

It is not always the plodding diyer who is at fault. Some years ago, here in the North of Ireland, a plumber left his blow torch going and unattended above the suspended ceiling of a large, newly built shopping centre. Even with all the modern fire protection systems he succeded in razing the place to the ground.
This single incident was central to the call for increased liability indemnity in the UK. The firm he worked for dilligently carried one million pound cover. Unfortunately, the damage bill was well in excess of that!

The indemnity angle certainly raises some anomolies when it comes to insurance.

As most people in Britain will be aware, mandatory automotive insurance here provides for unlimited indemnity to third parties, whereas in the U.S. and many other countries you buy cover to whatever level you want (subject to a legal minimum -- I believe as low as $20,000 in some states).

So in Britain and most of Europe, if you crashed your van into the building and started a fire which razed it to the ground, you'd be covered for the whole amount, unlike the worker that Lyle mentioned with his £1 million cover.

Inconsistent? You bet!

Oh dear Lyle,
That doesn't sound too good, but things like this CAN and DO happen, I had a situation a few years ago, where I burnt a good sized hole in a customers carpet with a soldering iron, I went out to the van to get a few connectors and was talking to the nieghbour, meanwhile the iron had slipped offthe top of the wirestrippers that I had sat it on(the flex was all twisted up).
Brand new carpet too and out in the middle of the room.
Never going to be that stupid again!!.