First off, no, it wasn’t serious. I mean, it was serious, but everyone still has a place to live!
Secondly, there is a lot of catching up to do, and lots of pictures to show, so I’ll try to split it up and make it as painless as possible. I can’t guarentee I’ll detail everything totally, but I’ll do my best while sitting here and scanning pictures from today.
I got home from work on Friday and as I pulled in a lady I had never seen before, but apparently is now living in my old apartment here at The Crest, comes up and says “so you missed the excitement.”…
“Huh?” I reply intelligently.
“We had a fire here today!”
“Huh?”
“Follow me, I’ll show you.”
So I followed her and around the back of the building, where Fozbaca’s place used to be, a fair portion of the side of the hill was black. On the way there was the remnents of a fence that was taken down by firefighters. Trees were burned up their sides and windows were cracked.
“Holy shit.”
We walked around back and I saw scary stuff. All the way up the lawn in the back, within about 15 feet of the building was blackened. The trees beside the building were blackened all the way up to the roof’s height. Very scary stuff. We were quite close to not having a home.
No official cause was given, but it would be reasonable to assume that someone discarded a smoke coming up the path down the hill. As I was coming back up and admiring the soot all over the parked cars, another guy was there with his wife and the way they were talking led me to deduce (correctly) that he was with the fire department. We started talking and he said that three trucks were called across town to a structural fire. The first truck arrived and found it to be a grease fire, and called off the other trucks. That’s why they weren’t on the other side of town. About the same time someone came into the firehall (barely visible from my building) and said “the trucks are going in the wrong direction!” and pointed to the blazing side of the hill.
The funny thing (kinda) is that there was a false alarm the other night which I didn’t take seriously at all because they used to happen every other week in my old building. Now I’ll be just a little bit more paranoid. I took a bunch of quick shots, you can find them here.