Wednesday, January 7, 2009

CALL 911!

Yep, I was extracted from bed last night at 10:30pm by Angela, who can stay up much later than I can every night. It seems the Apartment building across the parking lot from us' fire/smoke alarm was going off. People were flooding out of the building yelling call 911. This is when we realized, that this, unlike every single other time, was the actual event. The building was on fire. We ran out our patio door to see what we could see. Fire trucks kept pulling in the the lot, 5 of them. Police, Ambulance, every emergency vehicle you can imagine. At first it didn't seem to be too much of a big fire, but then, we cold see this orange glow emerge from the roof of the building. It was definitely a significant fire.
We put our coats, boots and hats on (winter storm/ice pellets/freezing rain warning last night) and went across the street because we are nosey like that, we made sure to stay well out of the way of anything going on. It seems that one of the apartment units on the top floor (only a 4 story building) was the source of the fire. The bedroom windows were burnt out, the rooms appeared black and there were black stains up to the roof and all the gutters and such were all melted and burned.
We wanted to help, but we didn't know what to do. It was scary, and sad. Sad to think about all those people who had to leave their home in the cold of night, not knowing what would come of things.
There was a city bus on site, for people to sit in to keep warm. One lady sticks out in my mind, she wore only a housecoat and slippers.
I'm hoping that these people are not out of home for too long.
One thing I don't understand is, why after all was done, and fire was out, emergency vehicles gone, was the very loud alarm ringing all night long?
I have some pictures on my cell phone. I might post them later. They aren't that great quality.

*****See the story in the paper here!*****
***Updated Story***

1 comment:

Teaberry said...

wow! what a tragedy about the man who passed away... I'm so glad that it wasn't your building!