uh whoa

[dragonlady7]

Driving in to work this morning, as I was coming down the street where my "office" (it's a factory really) is located, there were flashing lights. I saw a cop car and thought maybe there had been a traffic accident, as there were several cars pulled over, flashers going, etc. I saw a fire truck too and thought oh my, a serious accident. Then I noticed that the truck was parked sideways across the corner of an intersection, and hooked up to a fire hydrant. It was then that I looked down the side street and realized that there was a two-story wood-frame house entirely engulfed in flames and the fire truck was using the ladder thingy to spray it.
Oh.
So anyway, it's visible from the window next to my desk, and there's a fireman up on top of the ladder looking pensively down. It started to hail shortly after I got into work, and had been raining all morning, and now it looks like they've got the fire out, but there's not very much left of the house.

This is a poor neighborhood, with factories like mine (big rotting brick hulks; we only use about 1/3 of the total building, and the rest sits with boarded-up windows and stained exterior. Potential employees sometimes don't show up to the interview and we know they've seen the place from the road and decided we're too sketchy to be legit. It's nice inside, and we use the portion farthest from the road so what they're looking at isn't even the facility, but it is intimidating) interspersed with 50s-era two-story woodframe structures, many two-family or subdivided into apartments, with tiny yards and lines strung up for laundry and dull plastic broken children's toys scattered in the weeds.
To the north, the side of our building that we use, there is a giant highway, rte. 190, that runs at about the second-storey level of the houses.
Traffic was backed up for miles in the westbound lanes because the fire was visible from the road and people were gawking.
But the eastbound lanes, where I came from, couldn't see it at all.
Our office manager and sales manager carpool from a distance eastward, so they were on the part of the highway with the bad traffic. "It just said there was a fire near the Smith Street exit," she said. "Didn't say what was burning. I was tempted to just assume it was our building and turn around and go home."

It was an odd start to the day, anyway. Now I'm wondering, come to think of it, what my insurance policy is like... and I should get one of those stickers you put in the window to let firefighters know there's a kitty inside.

Comments

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

fires FREAK ME OUT because I've got cats.
Of course, most people only think about fires when they see a place near them burning down. Whereas I see fires...oh, maybe three times a week. So it's kind of always on my mind.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah.
I freak out about fires occasionally. I have this sort of ongoing horror of coming home and finding the place burned down and nobody knew where I was or how to contact me so there's just this pile of ashes and my house is gone, and I don't know what happened or what to do.
It's not a nightmare, it's just a scenario I come up with all the time.
(I don't know what's wrong with me but I always have scenarios like that going on. That scenario was worse when I lived in an apartment with no renter's insurance. Yesterday I had come up with a scenario wherein I tripped over the frame of my bed and smashed all my teeth. This scenario probably owes itself to my realization that I have no dental insurance.)

But it's the worst with cats. What do you do? Dogs you can pretty safely just let out, trusting they'll be confused enough to hang around-- or, failing that, someone will pick them up and start looking for their owner. (This happened last October during the blizzard-- a dog boarding facility caught fire, probably from using candles to see, and they had to turn the dogs loose. All but one were caught immediately, but that last one ran down the street. Within five minutes, a passing car saw the dog standing by the road, and stopped-- it was a blizzard, and it was night. They opened the door to speak to the dog, and the dog jumped into their car. Immediately they figured out the dog was from the dog boarding place on fire, and called the owner, but she didn't check her answering machine for about 24 hours, so the dog was 'missing', but really, not actually missing.) Cats, though-- indoor cats don't know what to do outside, and who knows if they'll have the sense to come back. Especially if their home is burned down and there's nothing left for them to recognize!
It's very scary, but scarier to think of them burning to death.

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

I was startled to learn last year how scared my cats are of fire. I brought them to my parents' house for Christmas. We had a little fire in a woodstove at the far end of the living room, and they would creep down the stairs and peer around the corner at me, but they wouldn't even take one step into that room while the fire was lit. The rest of the time, they were fearless. Well, fearless of the room, anyway. It was clearly the fire.

But I'm terribly afraid they would run and hide under a bed, rather than try to run out of the house.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

Wow, Chita's not scared enough of fire. Well, she hasn't much experience-- just standing on the counter and being nosy while i was using the gas stove. She curled the ends of some of her whiskers and wasn't terribly respectful. But then, she is not the sharpest tool in the shed, and also has an underdeveloped sense of self-preservation.

I think actually that's usually the problem-- cats, when frightened, run and hide, while dogs freak out and run around. The motivation behind putting the stickers on the windows for the firemen is so they know to look for a kitty while they're clearing the house. Just like the stickers for kids, which we did have when I was a child-- because young children, often even those old enough to have been told otherwise, often hide in their closets or under their bed because they're terrified and confused, and so firefighters are trained to look there if they know there's a child in the house.

Wait, you'd know this better than me-- am I making that up? I swear I read it somewhere.

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

yep, you're right -- in fact they don't even need the stickers. If they notice things in the house, like cat dishes, they look under furniture and stuff and even do CPR. But still, lots of cats die in fires.

[dragonlady7.livejournal.com]

I remember you writing about the kitty CPR now!!

:( I bet a lot of kitties do die in fires. My parents' kitties would probably be OK though, because when they're frightened, they run to the basement, and there's a small hole in the foundation that they use as a cat door.

I wouldn't know where Chita runs when she's scared-- she's never scared. We can't always find her, so I know she goes places, but I don't know where she goes. It's such a small house... you wouldn't think there'd be any secret places. But there must be. :(
Now I'm all paranoid again! Oh well.

[kkatowll.livejournal.com]

My cats always run under my bed. Which is a waterbed. So the chances of a firefighter lifting it up? Nonexistent.
*sigh*