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thedeadlyhookWell, that was neat. Today I stopped a fire.
On my morning walk, heading up toward Golden Gate Park, I heard this sizzle-popping sound. Retraced my steps a few yards to investigate and holee-hell, an overhead electrical line had thrown up sparks and smoke, fried through its casing, and was now burning merrily. Like a little stovetop fire, about twelve inches away from the building the power line went into.
I asked another passerby if he had a phone; he didn't, and suggested I ring an apartment bell instead. Which I did - climbed the stairs, buzzed the buzzer closest to the problem and told the lady who answered the door. And then told some other residents as they were coming out to go to work. Everybody was fairly open-mouthed - I mean, there you are, coming out of your building in the morning, and here's this minor conflagration doing its campfire-style thing, right there in the open air. Inside of fifteen minutes, a firetruck rolled up, and about five or six people and four big dogs from the building got to stand on the sidewalk and rubberneck as one of the firefighters went up to the second floor apartment and put out the little fire with an extinguisher. The fire was right outside the window.
Apparently, one of the residents told me, they'd turned on the heat that morning, and all the lights had dimmed; I also heard another resident say the same thing had happened when she'd been using her hair dryer. Obviously an overload and yeah, old building. Which reminded me of one of our old apartments, the one in which the lights sometimes dimmed when the refrigerator kicked on. Scary.
But what really scares me to think about is how long a little fire like that might have burned without anyone noticing, if everyone had been at work. Outside, no smoke, nothing to set off a fire alarm, but how long would it have taken to have burned its way up the line until it reached the building? Or ignited one of the other lines?
Really scary.
On my morning walk, heading up toward Golden Gate Park, I heard this sizzle-popping sound. Retraced my steps a few yards to investigate and holee-hell, an overhead electrical line had thrown up sparks and smoke, fried through its casing, and was now burning merrily. Like a little stovetop fire, about twelve inches away from the building the power line went into.
I asked another passerby if he had a phone; he didn't, and suggested I ring an apartment bell instead. Which I did - climbed the stairs, buzzed the buzzer closest to the problem and told the lady who answered the door. And then told some other residents as they were coming out to go to work. Everybody was fairly open-mouthed - I mean, there you are, coming out of your building in the morning, and here's this minor conflagration doing its campfire-style thing, right there in the open air. Inside of fifteen minutes, a firetruck rolled up, and about five or six people and four big dogs from the building got to stand on the sidewalk and rubberneck as one of the firefighters went up to the second floor apartment and put out the little fire with an extinguisher. The fire was right outside the window.
Apparently, one of the residents told me, they'd turned on the heat that morning, and all the lights had dimmed; I also heard another resident say the same thing had happened when she'd been using her hair dryer. Obviously an overload and yeah, old building. Which reminded me of one of our old apartments, the one in which the lights sometimes dimmed when the refrigerator kicked on. Scary.
But what really scares me to think about is how long a little fire like that might have burned without anyone noticing, if everyone had been at work. Outside, no smoke, nothing to set off a fire alarm, but how long would it have taken to have burned its way up the line until it reached the building? Or ignited one of the other lines?
Really scary.
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Date: 2006-01-20 11:00 am (UTC)Ah, SF apartments. Our lights-dim-when-the-fridge-turns-over place had a similar default combo that would always blow a fuse - I think it was TV-computer-too many lights-fridge on, and then anything else you hit after that was the clincher. The toaster. The vacuum. The bathroom light. We used to try to juggle the plugs so everything wasn't quite so daisy-chained, but it never worked. There were only about four plugs in the entire apartment. And I've lived in a place with the gas fixtures, but they weren't hooked up anymore. Luckily.