You guys, there was totally an extra-alarm fire in my building last night! It was around 12:30 am. My roommate and I had just finished watching and mercilessly mocking Magic Beyond Words: The J.K. Rowling Story on Lifetime when we kept hearing sirens. Not unusual for Lake Shore Drive. It's a busy road. But then we kept noticing how loud they were. And how they kept stopping abruptly. We went over to the window, and there were approximately 30 fire trucks and emergency vehicles parked outside our building, lights flashing, fire fighters spilled everywhere. Our block had been shut down.
Our window looks over the main lobby. The lobby is a long low building that connects the two, 25-floor towers of our high-rise. Smoke was billowing out of the lobby, but we could not see flames. Hoses snaked inside.
"Holy shit, the lobby's on fire!" I say.
"Turn on the TV!" my roommate replies.
You may think this is an odd request, but our schmancy building has a channel on TV where you can see what's going on in the lobby. It's typically a clear picture of the front desk and doors. Tonight we see nothing. Just whiteness. It's filled with smoke.
"Holy shit!" I yell. "Holy shit! I do not want to die in a fire tonight!"
"What do we do?" asks my roommate. "Are we supposed to stay in our apartment? Leave?"
"The alarm isn't going off. Why isn't there an alarm going off? There is clearly a fire happening!"
"I don't want to get trapped up here and have to like, jump off the side of the building into a crappy net." (We're on the 17th floor.)
"We need to get out of here!" I say, and repeat approximately 40 times while I gather my laptop, wallet, phone and camera. My roommate grabs her stuff but is taking too long.
"What are you doing?" I exclaim impatiently.
"I'm looking for a tampon!"
"No time! There is no time for periods! I probably have one in my bag, let's go!"
We exit our apartment and make our way down the stairwell. It's oddly quiet - no one else seems to be out of their units. As we walk briskly down the stairs, my elementary school self surfaces. My hand reaches out and touches the door and handle of each floor we pass, feeling for heat. Nothing.
We make it to the mezzanine level when we hear it. Yelling. Huge clanking. Whooshing. More yelling. It smells like burning tires. Something is clearly happening on the other side of the door. I start to wuss out.
"I don't think we can get out this way," I say, stopping. "We gotta find another way or go back up! Something is happening right here! We can't go down this way."
We stand there for a minute staring at each other, the yelling and clanking and whooshing never ceasing.
"We're going down," my roommate says. "There is no way we are going back up."
And so we go. We descend another flight and now there are fire fighters everywhere but no blaze in front of us. Then we are on the ground level and I am asking fire fighters trailing a hose and carrying axes how the hell we get out of here.
"Follow the hose!" one of them says. "Just follow the hose!" Thank you, hose man! And so we follow the hose and we are outside in the cool night. We hug because we are lame and have just watched a super cheesy Lifetime movie, but also because we have escaped unscathed from the fear-inducing unknown.
"I need to change my tampon," my roommate says.
From hearing the radio dispatch broadcasting loudly from a fire truck and talking to others, we learn a fire started in the storage room on the mezzanine level. It took them 1/2 hour to control the blaze. No one was hurt. I have never seen so many fire men (and a few badass women) in my life. There had to be at least 150 of them. For some reason they also punched out a bunch of windows in the lobby.
Anyway, there was a lot of waiting outside. Things I witnessed while waiting:
- drunk people eating a shit-ton of Taco Bell
- drunk people ordering a pizza
- a pizza man trying to deliver said pizza to a smoky lobby and being hilariously denied
- an obnoxious set of girls posing for pictures next to a fire truck
- a fire fighter asking my roommate for her phone number
- a clearly very high guy coming up to me and describing how "totally insane the lights are" and how the "sirens are like colors" and asking if I lived there 10 times
- a conversation between my roommate and I how Bear Grylls from Man vs. Wild would have handled the situation. (Create a rope using our clothes and repel down the side of our building, pausing only to catch and eat a pigeon for sustenance.)
Around 2 am we were allowed back in the building. No alarm ever went off in the building. Apparently they thought there was no threat to the upper floors so people should have just stayed in their units (oops - whatever I'm still glad I got
the hell out of there). It still smelled terrible today, even though they got the smoke out with this fancy wind machine. Check out the smoke damage in the lobby as of this afternoon:
And that is the story of my first extra-alarm fire. It is also the story of how I finally purchased renter's insurance.
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