I rejoiced too soon

I'm afraid I rejoiced a little too soon at the power coming back on. It is true that my refrigerator, dishwasher, TV, and so on are working fine, but the heater in the living room never did begin working again, so this afternoon we took the thing apart (with great difficulty) and exposed a totally demolished heating element. We had to take it apart with brute force, as they are not meant to be dismantled. We took out screws, forced seams apart and at one point used all of our combined strength to pull the back of the thing off. All to no avail. The heating element is not only burned out but twisted and broken in two. Why the house didn't catch on fire I do not know. We will make no attempt at repairs, as it is far from new, but will replace it with perhaps a better model. I will put in a claim to P'G&E for reimbursement but I doubt if I will get anything as I didn't have a surge protector on it, so it is my fault really. We didn't get to eat dinner until almost eight and then we only had pancakes because I hadn't taken time to cook anything. Luckily, we were too hungry to care what we ate.