Fire

Great excitement last night - we had a fire in our apartment building!

The alarm jolted us awake at about 3:30 am. I knew it was a real fire right away because I could smell the smoke. I had a moment of panic - what do we do? - and then fell back on my years of conditioning from fire drills in elementary school - oh yeah, get out of the building! and line up on the playground outside! I grabbed some sneakers and a coat, and caught the surprised guinea pigs and put them in their traveling case. Their reaction to the whole thing varied between confusion and disbelief. They wrinkled their noses at me: "You have to be joking!"

When we stepped into the hallway, the smoke was stronger - kind of a thick, yellow smell like burned toast or overheated dryer, but much more concentrated. It was worse in the stairwell. Luckily we were only on the fourth floor. We got down to the lobby and spilled outside with the rest of the population. I was hoping some people would be wearing interesting pajamas, but everyone was pretty much in sweat pants and jackets. A couple women had big fluffy pink slippers. The quintessential gentleman who lives on the second floor and never goes anywhere except in a three-piece suit with a carnation in his lapel, was wearing - a three-piece suit. He probably doesn't own any other kind of clothing.

After a few minutes the police arrived, and ten minutes after the alarm first sounded, the fire trucks pulled up. It was very exciting to see those big flashing trucks parked right next to us on the sidewalk, and the firemen unrolling hoses into our building. We heard a police woman calling out the apartment number to the firemen as they went in - it was on the second floor. I walked around to try to see it, but nothing was apparent from the outside. Shortly thereafter they let everyone who didn't live on the second floor go back indoors. We opened all the windows to get the smoke out, and went back to sleep.

This morning, because I was curious, I called the resident manager to find out how the fire got started. She said that a woman was cooking a midnight snack and left the stove on by accident, then went to bed. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

So that's the story of the Great Fire!