Whew.

[dvandom]

About an hour ago, I started smelling smoke, and then heard sirens. Stepping outside, I found the neighborhood hazy with smoke, with one of the apartment buildings down the block apparently being on fire. Right now, thought, the emergency vehicles are gone and with them the smoke. Hope no one got hurt.

Edit: A quick drive around the block doesn't reveal any obviously fire-damaged property, so either it was a unit hidden from view from the street, or just a lot of internal damage without making it to the outside.

Comments

[loki-liesmith.livejournal.com]

Crazy. hope everyone's okay.

[grant-p.livejournal.com]

Glad it wasn't bigger or in your building!

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

There were two significant fires in the vicinity of my house when I lived in Waltham, MA a few years ago. The lesser of the two was next door (my house was next door to a large brick apartment building), and though the firefighters tied up the street for hours, they managed to confine the fire to the one apartment it started in, so there was never any significant danger to any of the surrounding buildings.

The other was several blocks away, but in some ways was actually hairier, because it was a huge friggin' fire that filled the whole downtown area with dense smoke. The light of it could be seen over the surrounding rooftops from my bedroom window on the third floor. That was unnerving. Again the Waltham FD did a great job containing it - only the one building it started in was lost, but that building was a total loss and all of downtown smelled like smoke for days.

That was was made even more unnerving when it turned out to have been arson. I forget the precise details now, but IIRC, a guy had been living in the News-Tribune building when he wasn't supposed to (it wasn't zoned for residential use), and when he got bounced, he came back at night and set the building on fire.

The lot was a weird sight for weeks afterward. The building was completely destroyed, reduced to a heap of charred bricks, except for one thing: In the center of the lot, surrounded by rubble, stood a large, blackened but otherwise unharmed safe.