Chris Janson Says Tennessee House Fire ‘Could Have Been Very Bad’

In mid-April, Chris Janson‘s wife, Kelly, awoke to the faint beeping of a fire alarm in their home south of Nashville, Tennessee. The beeping was coming from Janson’s basement studio, where a fire was raging. “Thank God, God woke up my wife Kelly,” Janson told PEOPLE. “If it weren’t for her hearing that faint ‘beep, beep’ of the fire detector, it could have been very bad.”

After making sure Kelly and children Georgia and Jessie were safely out of the home and calling 911, Janson took matters into his own hands while waiting for the Williamson County Fire Department, trying to put the fire out with large buckets of water. “I went into survival mode,” the “Good Vibes” singer recalled. “The fire melted my ottoman and literally created a campfire essentially right in the middle of my studio room. Thankfully, it didn’t burn the house.”

Kelly wrote on Instagram that first responders were at the house within 10 minutes, and a clean-up crew is now “gutting the whole bottom” of the house. “I’m just grateful to be alive,” Janson said. “I’m grateful that the house didn’t burn down.” Though the fire burned the ottoman in Janson’s studio room, one item on top of the piece remained mostly intact.

“It was our Jesus Calling devotional book,” he shared. “It’s not quite a Bible, but we have read from it since we were dating. The one that had been sitting on the ottoman was a spare copy since we keep the original copy by our bed. But it was one of the only things on the ottoman not completely burned up. I’ve said it multiple times, but God has our back. There is no other reason than Kelly would have woken up that night to that faint ‘beep beep.’”

Jason thinks that the first was caused by his laptop, whose “battery portion is burned upon it and is fused together with the charger.” “I am quite convinced that it literally just got overheated and one thing led to another,” he said, adding a message about the importance of making sure your smoke alarms are functioning.

“I encourage people to check smoke alarms,” Janson shared. “It’s something we don’t think about, but in ours, all of the detectors were supposed to be hardwired in and they are, but for some reason they all didn’t go off at one time. Only the one in that one room was going off.”