Fire
March 16th, 2010
We could have died in the fire that erupted last night in our building.
Do you know where the emergency exits in your building are? Can you handle a fire extinguisher?
My flatmate was awake at 3 a.m. when he noticed a particularly pungent stench. He checked all the rooms in our apartment only to realize that the stench was coming from the hallway. One of his first thoughts was that an apartment could have taken fire. While talking to the police on his mobile phone he went looking for the source. He went down eight flights of stairs checking every apartment door until he got to the entrance. The smoke made it hard to see and breathe.
We didn’t die and I’m still blogging. The boring truth is that my other flatmate and I slept like babies, while he saw that the fire was located at the main door and managed to put it out.
My flatmates had left while I was asleep this morning, so I was completely uninformed. About to go to university, I was amazed and slightly amused by the fact that I didn’t have to open the entrance door because there was none. A part of the carpet was charred and the surrounding ceiling had changed from white to blackish. I quickly took some pictures and asked the portiere about what happened. He told me that my flatmate had put out the fire. I continued my journey to the lecture that for some reason didn’t take place. When I got home my flatmate gave me his account of the night:
The police had arrived quite subito and the firefighters came running some 20 minutes after the alarm. When they saw that the fire had already been put out they turned around and left without even wanting to make a guess about how it could have initiated. Neither did the police, telling my flatmate that we would have to accuse someone if we wanted them to conduct an investigation. Then they left, too. Now the administration of the building will have the entrance cleaned up and the door and carpet replaced and nobody will know what set the door on fire. Except the guys who did it.
The entrance to the building
I have a friend who once filmed his neighbour’s house burning down. When the police asked him to testify a couple of days later he showed them his video, complete with some dramatic movie soundtrack, as he later recounted with a big grin on his face. I played around with some imaging software to make the photograph look more frightening, but I failed and so I’m showing the original.
I guess what could have been a pretty dramatic story in the end amounts to nothing much and therefore joins the many news articles with that same fate. Remember what Chesterton said: Journalism largely consists of saying ‘Lord Jones is Dead’ to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive.
Just make sure you know where the emergency exits in your building are.
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