[DanG]

So about 1am this morning my wife wakes me up and says she smells something burning. I've got bad allergies and can't smell too well and said we've got a half dozen smoke detectors, if something was burning, they'd go off. She got up to look around the house and says it's something in or around your fish tank. Head downstairs and sure enough, smells like burnt electronics. Everything is running except my skimmer. I pull it out and there's a looney sized hole in the pump and what I thought, the source of the smell. Take another smell around my tank and it's the water that stinks.
I pulled out the reactors and refilled one with fresh carbon and one with fresh GFO. Dropped a couple of new bags of Chemipure in the bubble traps of the sump and did a 10G water change. I started looking around the inside of the tank and my coral beauty was dead, the six line wrasse was right next to the coral beauty and my 15 year old blue tang also dead. There were a couple of snails and hermits that were still wandering around and seemed fine.
Made it to bed around 430 this morning and when I got up at 11, no sign of anyone in the tank, so I can only assume that they've all died.
I've got another 10G water change queued up for tonight, but I'm not sure what the point of it is with everyone dead.

So obviously this is a major hit to the tank, but in order to get the tank going again, I don't have a clue where to start. I've got all the reef test kits, but don't know what could have killed everyone so fast, so I don't know what to really test for. I got all the fish out before they started decomposing and am not really worried about the 6 snails and crabs. Do I keep doing 10G water changes, drain the whole thing and refill, is my sand contaminated, rock still ok to use?

I also need a new skimmer for my tank, it's 70G with a 10G sump. I've traditionally had a light bio load, so I don't need something huge. The previous skimmer was an marine Color RDC 250 and I'm not interested in trying that again unless I could get a better pump for it.


Any help would be appreciated.