Young Boys Playing With Lighter Set Fire to Home

MISSION VIEJO —  Twin boys playing with a butane lighter started a fire Wednesday morning that caused about $100,000 damage to their home, the latest in a spate of recent fires involving children with lighters, matches or candles.

“We’ve had about seven such fires in the last 10 days,” said Capt. Dan Young of the Orange County Fire Authority. “Children and lighters are a dangerous mix. I don’t know how many times I have said that and still, I don’t seem to be getting that message through to people. It’s very frustrating.”

Marsh and Daiva Baldwin, parents of the 3-year-old twins, were awakened about 9:20 a.m. to a smoke-filled room and their children “running around yelling,” Young said. They grabbed the boys and ran out of the house unharmed, but the blaze destroyed the three-bedroom house in the 23000 block of Via Santa Maria.

Twenty-four firefighters controlled the blaze in about 25 minutes. It began in the boys’ bedroom and was started with a butane lighter.

Firefighters said they think either there was no smoke alarm in the house or that it didn’t work. The family of five, including a 6-year-old boy who was in school at the time, was given temporary housing by the American Red Cross.

On New Year’s Day, a 4-year-old boy playing with a candle in his room ignited a fire that injured two people and gutted his family’s Aliso Viejo apartment, fire authorities said.

A week earlier, children playing with matches or lighters also set fire to a family Christmas tree in Huntington Beach and a Corona del Mar home, causing a total of $600,000 in damage, firefighters said.

“Adults need to take the same care with lighters as they do with knives, guns and poisons around children,” Young said. Lighters “are just as dangerous.”