Fire

My two biggest fears (outside of harm to my family) are car accidents and fires.  (In that order)  In light of recent tornadoes in the southeast, tornadoes might be number 3 on my list of fears, but that is neither here nor there.

On Thursday morning I woke up around 6am and saw flashing lights out the window.  I looked out the window... "Chris, there's a fire truck outside!"  Chris: grunt.  Jen: Oh my goodness there's lots of fire trucks outside!  Chris: another grunt as he rolls back over and pulls the blanket up over his head.  Well I ran downstairs to see what was going on and the street is lined with firetrucks and it is actually blocked off so no one could get in or out of our little neighborhood.  The end unit of townhouse row across the street had caught fire.  Yikes!  (Sorry these pictures are from my cell phone, so they're not great...)

Thankfully, the owner wasn't home and the lady who lived next door happened to be staying at her son's house that night, so no one was injured.  It was still pretty dark outside at 6am so it was hard to see the extent of the damage.  I had thought that there were an awful lot of fire trucks (there were 8 trucks) and emergency rescue vehicles there- the front of the unit did not look like it suffered too much damage.  They had extinguished all the flames by the time I joined the crowd outside.  But yet there were still a lot of firemen going in and out with their masks and protective pants/coats.

Well later that morning after the sun came up and most of the fire trucks, policemen, and hazmat trucks had left, I saw that the fire damage was more extensive than I had originally thought.  It looks like the entire garage burned off, the cars were pulled out and completely charred and the side of the unit had evidence of some pretty significant burns.  (Its hard to tell the full extent of the damage from pictures, but it gives an idea...)  And of course there were piles of soot and ash everywhere.  They were not sure how the fire started, but will be doing an investigation.  Thankfully our units have firewalls between them, but there was certainly still some water and smoke damage to the unit next door.  There were fire/water cleanup trucks working on that unit for the next 48 hours.

That evening I asked Chris to check all our smoke alarms to make sure they were all functional with working batteries.  It was certainly a scary way to wake up on Thursday morning, but again we are so thankful that no one was injured and that the firemen were able to keep the fire under control to minimize damage and spreading.