Burning down the house

[agt_spooky]

So we had an actual fire at my office building this morning. Everyone thought it was just a drill when the alarms went off and we all filed outside into the parking lot. It's a beautiful day and we're all just standing in our groups chatting when the fire department shows up. We were then informed that it wasn't a drill. Our maintenance guy was in the basement and smelled smoke. He investigated and some sort of compressor was on fire so he pulled the alarm.

The fire department is literally across the street from our building so they were there in no time. We were outside for probably 30 minutes and it was all taken care of and we were allowed to go back inside. As soon as we stepped in we could smell the smoke and burnt rubber. Gross!

Being a lover of all things fire department, I snapped a pic when I got back up to my desk. This was only part of the equipment they sent. There were three engines, two ambulances and the fire chief.

Got lucky and two VERY hot (pardon the pun *g*) firemen were standing in our lobby in full turnout gear. Damn, I wish I could've gotten a pic of either of them! LOL! I immediately had visions of Lucas and Evan from my book Burnin' for You. :-)

And now back to the rest of my boring day!

Comments

[charityflint.livejournal.com]

Is that a Quint? Wow! Scary but exciting, too.

You could have said you were the NOW liason/coordinator with the fire department. "I made sure everyone from our department evacuated quickly and completely, Mr. Hunky firefighter."

[agt-spooky.livejournal.com]

Yes it is! Kudos to you for knowing your fire equipment!

I talked to our maintenance guy afterwards and he actually ran inside the compressor room and shut off the machine. Brave or stupid, I'm not sure! But he most definitely did prevent a major fire.

LOL! Darn! Why didn't I think to say that to Mr. Hunky Firefighter??

[tracys-dream.livejournal.com]

Glad everyone was okay.
At least you got to see some hunky firemen. ;)

[agt-spooky.livejournal.com]

I talked to our maintenance guy afterwards and he actually ran inside the compressor room and shut off the machine. Brave or stupid, I'm not sure! But he most definitely did prevent a major fire.

Oh my yes, the firemen were definitely the highlight! LOL!

[bluewolf458.livejournal.com]

Well done the guy who pulled the alarm! And well done everyone who didn't assume it was a false alarm and delayed leaving the building, which seems to be a very common reaction in the UK!

[agt-spooky.livejournal.com]

I talked to him afterwards and he actually ran inside the compressor room and shut off the machine. Brave or stupid, I'm not sure! But he most definitely did prevent a major fire.

This isn't the first time something has truly been wrong when the alarm has gone off, so we all tend to leave in a quick, orderly fashion!

[bluewolf458.livejournal.com]

One school I worked in, the wire for the school bell and the wire for the fire alarm were very close together and sometimes (surprisingly often) the bell shorted out the alarm, which went off. Didn't seem to be anything anyone could do about it short of a major rewiring. You'd get teachers sticking their heads out of their rooms debating whether this was yet another false alarm, a practice run (though we tended to be warned about those) or real, and were we going to act on it... Usually someone said, "Well, I'm taking my class out..." and everyone else followed.

Though the craziest one was when someone phoned a bomb scare into the school (it was at a time when there was a lot of trouble with the IRA planting bombs). We had to keep the kids out while the police came, checked the building... everyone was 100% sure it was a hoax, but they had to go through the motions. And yes, the kid responsible was caught next day - he'd been playing hooky (do you know that term? - truanting) and decided to see what would happen...

But for a long time, every con we went to had an unplanned fire drill; at some point over the weekend the fire alarm in the hotel would go off. Once it was sort-of genuine - the fire, around 10pm, was in a casino underneath the hotel. But firemen had to check out the hotel too although there was no link between it and the casino, even though it was the same building. Several of the firemen pounded up the stairs... and met Batman's Joker coming down. (Before they left, they got him to pose for a photo with them.)

Ah, memories...

[agt-spooky.livejournal.com]

Your school must be related to my friend's, where she used to be a teacher. Constantly had problems with the fire alarm and even the fire department themselves had issues shutting it off and resetting it!

We even had bomb threats over here when I was a kid. And yep, it was always some punk kid who thought it was funny.

Wow, I can say that at least I've never had a fire alarm at a convention I was at! And more than once?? Crazy! OMG, I would've loved to have seen the firemen posing with The Joker. [snort]

[bluewolf458.livejournal.com]

At cons, it got to a point where, when the fire engines arrived we'd give them a rousing cheer. One time a family staying at the hotel but not attending the con were standing there, shivering with nerves, and the father turned to one of our folk and asked, "H...how can you all be so calm?"

"Practice."

In a lot of cases we never did find out what triggered the alarm, but once it was when the band at the Saturday night disco set off a smoke bomb, and once, about 2am, someone going back to his room and probably drunk (though we had very little bother with anyone drinking too much - maybe just enough to make him silly) decided to see what would happen if he held a lit lighter just under a smoke alarm. The firemen found the alarm in question and could say what triggered it, but we never did identify the culprit. One time it was early in the evening, a lot of us had been watching a Trek episode and you never saw a more slowly-moving corridor of people as everyone filed out... or a faster-moving one going back when it was announced some five minutes later (nobody had even got the length of the stairs) that it *was* a false alarm.

But our interaction with the fire service wasn't always funny. There was one time, on the Saturday, there was a serious fire somewhere in the city, and two firemen were killed. On the Sunday morning it was announced that a fund had been started for their families. The con committee went around with buckets collecting for it, then took the money along to the nearest fire station. Everyone had contributed at least a pound, some had given more, so it was quite a lot. The folk there were grateful, adding, "You don't even belong here." and were told, "But it could have been our hotel." It was, in a way, our thanks to all the firemen who had turned out to our various false alarms.

[agt-spooky.livejournal.com]

Kudos to all of you for graciously donating. Isn't it sad that an act of kindness like that is greeted with such surprise?