CHAOS IN THE NEWS
Fire damages home of Waukegan 'junk lady'
By Rex W. Huppke
Chicago Tribune staff reporter
October 25, 2002, 2:05 PM CDT
A fire has rendered uninhabitable the house of a woman who for years fought with city officials — first in Highland Park, and then, Waukegan — over her collection of broken toys, old clothes, old food and other odds and ends.
Spontaneous combustion appears to have caused the blaze in Martha Douglas' 1 ½-story Cape Cod-style house in the 700 block of South Green Bay Road, officials of the Waukegan Fire Department said today.
The fire started around noon Thursday in a first-floor bedroom, fire Lt. Dan Young said. The room was packed so tight with boxes and other items, flames may simply have erupted as the result of a chemical reaction from old, oily rags or some other substance.
Firefighters had to cut a 6-foot-square hole in the exterior wall of the room so they could remove the clutter and get to the smoldering source of the fire. They also found boxes stacked to the ceiling in rooms and hallways throughout the house.
"Lawnmowers, strollers, all sorts of containers, boxes of clothes and broken toys and miscellaneous items, food stuffs — we had to get it all out of the way just to put the fire out," Young said.
The fire caused an estimated $30,000 in damage and left the house uninhabitable, Young said. The American Red Cross has provided Douglas, 80, with temporary housing.
For decades, Douglas has been a controversial character because of her penchant for accumulating stuff, from old cars and appliances to clothes and empty milk cartons.
Until October 1997, Douglas lived on the 1000 block of Half Day Road in Highland Park. For years, she had fought with Highland Park officials over a habit of filling her house and yard with belongings. The city brought in bulldozers in 1985 and in 1987 to remove the worst of the mess.
In the end, Highland Park bought the Green Bay Road house in Waukegan and swapped it with Douglas. With the city's help, she moved most of her belongings north up the lakefront to her new dwelling. Highland Park then bulldozed her old residence to make way for an expansion of the city waterworks.
Waukegan sued, accusing Highland Park of exporting one of its most vexing problems. But a Lake County judge dismissed the lawsuit in 1998 after Douglas cleaned up her home in response to building and zoning code citations issued by Waukegan. Douglas agreed to build two outside storage sheds and restore order in the house so there were exit paths in case of an emergency.
At the time, she complained she had lost a number of personal items that had been in storage or transit, including a color television set, her father's tool box, 18 ladders of various sizes, 50 bicycles, five firearms, wedding and engagement rings, a freezer and a washer and a dryer.
Copyright © 2002, Chicago Tribune-------------------------------------------------------
According to a report in the San Diego Union-Tribune, "a priceless piece of television history that legendary comedian Milton Berle feared was lost forever appears to merely have been buried under some clutter at NBC." The TV network reported finding nearly all the filmed recordings of Berle's early TV shows that the entertainer had claimed were missing.
This problem could have been avoided in the first place if they had followed The Miracle Worker's advice: Never pile something larger on top of something smaller! For more on this topic, read Chapter 4 of CONQUERING CHAOS AT WORK.
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David Marshall Brown was released from prison 19 years late because of lost paperwork.
Sounds like this was the fault of Chaos Creators with a bad case of Paperosis misplacea! Chapter 6 of CONQUERING CHAOS AT WORK explains how to cure it. (For emergency assistance, click on Advice Column and go to the Feb. archive.)
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Clarence Jackson Jr. showed up at Connecticut's lottery headquarters with a $5.8 million dollar winning lottery ticket. But he did not get the prize--he missed the deadline for claiming the jackpot by 3 days.
Poor Clarence! He's a Deadline Deadbeat. Chapter 7 of CONQUERING CHAOS AT WORK offers advice for working with Deadline Deadbeats, while Chapters 3 and 4 provide tactics to help you avoid becoming one yourself.
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According to a
Reuters wire service report, Microsoft Corp., the software giant worth an estimated $600 billion, said its free e-mail service, Hotmail, had been partially crippled because it forgot to pay a $35 bill. The chaos was caused after Microsoft failed to pay a $35 fee to registration company Network Solutions for rights to the Internet domain name passport.com, which verifies user names and passwords for Hotmail and other services. Hotmail has more than 52 million users around the world, but Microsoft said it is unclear how many experienced problems.How could this situation have been avoided? To find out, be sure to read Chapters 3 and 5 of CONQUERING CHAOS AT WORK, which include tips and techniques for preventing this and similar types of chaos.
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