Decorative lights lead to Metairie house fire, family warning others to be safe

The decorative lights that brighten your homes and spirits this holiday season can also pose the risk of causing home fires.

It is a lesson one Metairie family learned after their home went up in flames several weeks ago. Although the family of three made it out safely, they found out the hard way that everything can be gone in a split second after an electrical fire that started after plugging in holiday lights.

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Last month Marc Gervais and his family were getting into the holiday spirit and plugged in decorative lights outside their home, but while they slept things heated up.

"About 1:30 in the morning my neighbor comes beating on the door, I run to the back door, which was right back here, and actually saw this bright glow, I opened up the door and the wall was engulfed in flames," Gervais said.

Now the home they built from the ground up is destroyed. Fire investigators determined the fire started outside the home where they had plugged lights into an extension cord connected to an outlet.

"What they figured out was that either the cord was a really bad connection or the outlet could have been bad as well," he explained.

Now as more christmas decorations are going up in neighborhoods around town, they want to help prevent others from having a horrible mishap this holiday season.

"It's Christmas time right now and everybody's doing the same thing and so everybody's out having a good time, you put them down and you don't think anything about it and next thing you know you really should take some precautionary measures, in my opinion, check your extension cords, make sure they're good, make sure they're relatively new, buy new lights," Gervais suggested.

Jefferson Parish Fire Department officials agree and advise throwing away lights that have damaged cords or sockets. They say do not overload electrical outlets or run extension cords under carpets, across doorways, or near heaters, and do not use extension cords that are longer than necessary.

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Decorative lights lead to Metairie house fire, family warning others to be safe