So who is this Stam anyway?

FIRE!

Well...it's kinda old news by now, already. It happened last Wednesday, and I'm only now getting around to blogging it.

No photos, even, although I might go webcrawling later to see if any of the Jewish Internet sites have a couple I can stea- uh...borrow.

It was fairly late in the evening, around 9:30 or thereabouts. I'd gone upstairs to the second floor of the dormitory to take a shower (the water pressure's better there, for some odd reason).

I was mostly done (say, ten minutes in) when one of the Israeli guys comes in and tells me I have to get out.

"Why?" I asked. Mildly surprised.

"Because there's a fire in one of the rooms right over there," and he points in the general direction of the corridor.

::blink blink::

He walked out while I was still processing it.

Oh well, I thought, so there's a fire. Nothing to panic about. I rinsed off quickly and stepped back into my dressing gown, without towelling off, and headed out into the corridor.

Which had a solid cloud of smoke backed up under the ceiling, down to just about head height. And I do mean solid--couldn't see a thing through it at all. And it definitely hadn't been there ten minutes ago when I'd entered the showers.

Oookay, I guess there really is a fire! Moving on down the stairs back to my floor was seeming like a Really Good Idea.

And there were the usual people running around trying to think of doing things and not accomplishing much. Pretty chaotic. Lots of people screaming--most of them just because they were young and immature and it seemed like a good idea, I think, although some were trying to get everyone out of the building. Or at least keep them off the second floor where the fire was. Even now, I can't really sort out all that much of it, aside from recalling the building manager lugging a fire extinguisher past my room on the first floor and all.

I do recall that the first thing I did was dry my still-dripping hair, and then looked around for a bit trying to make some sense of the confusion and find out exactly what was happening and what people should be doing.

Anyway, they started chasing us all out of the building in earnest. So I got some clothes on in a hurry and headed outside with the others, where we could see how bad it was:

Anyone bring the marshmallows?

(Yes, I found some pictures. How did you guess?)

We all stood there just watching it burn for a bit, and then the fire brigade finally showed up. They rolled into the courtyard and opened up with the water tank those things carry. 2000 liters? Something like that?

Firefighter vs. fire.

What started to scare me was that the truck emptied the entire tank into the window. And the fire still looked like it was burning pretty strong, too...which is why they were already running hoses, I suppose. The water started again, and after a short while the fire was out.

Then it was just a matter of waiting while the firemen checked the floor for anyone who'd gotten caught, or had smoke inhalation (there were a couple of minor cases, people who'd rushed in earlier stupidly trying to put it out themselves). After a while people started to drift back in again, and get kicked out, only to drift back in again...

And the first floor (ours) was untouched. Not even a smell of smoke.

And considering that the room the fire'd been in looked like this:

Inside what's left of the room.
The soot marks.

And the hallway outside looked like this (note the marks left by the smoke cloud):

The hallway outside. Heat damage only.

I kind of thought the construction of the building testifies for itself.

Posted by adam at December 8, 2003 07:20 PM