Crazy thing happened today in our little village. About five hundred feet from our house ( five houses away ) is what the locals call "uptown". It's not Main St, but it's the main street. The town does have a Main Street, but it's...
Crazy thing happened today in our little village. About five hundred feet from our house ( five houses away ) is what the locals call "uptown". It's not Main St, but it's the main street. The town does have a Main Street, but it's not a well used road. But I digress, there was a fire uptown today. The dogs woke us and we smelled smoke. Our alarms weren't going off so I was relieved it wasn't our house. Looking out the window though we could see billowing smoke coming from uptown, which was upwind of us today.
PWB was quick to suit up and trudge through the snow to the end of the street to see what the heck was going on. The Beauty Salon was burning down. By the afternoon the HVAC place beside it also burned down. The HVAC was the last original building on that street as it's the only building to have survived the uptown fire of 1937.
The fire is now smouldering. In the blizzard. Visibility has been almost zero all day. I didn't really notice the blizzard until the majority of the smoke went away.
Here's a few photos PWB took through the course of the day.
The orange lifty thing has a fire dude in it who is spraying water on the bakery trying to save it. The empty space in front of the lifty thing is where the Beauty Salon was. ( it's actual name was Beauty Salon ). There's a small piece of the front of what was once the HVAC building. This and the next photo were taken at 130pm.
I'm sure it had no bearing on how hard the volunteer fire fighters worked today, but the store on the left is Phil's. Phil is also a volunteer fire fighter. The fire did not reach his store ;)
I found this interesting. In a small village we don't have enough water pressure for fire hydrants to work like you see in the city. Here they fill tanker trucks with water and dump them into what looks like a huge yellow kiddie pool and pump the water from there onto the fire. There was a second pool not shown in this photo. They were constantly replenished.
At the end of the day ( 445) all the smouldering steaming rubble was pushed into a pile. I'll be curious how big the pile is by morning. It's still smoking and steaming now at 145am.
That's it for my show and tell today. I wish I had my film 35mm here. I could have taken some nice photos of it in the dark with the icicles and the smoke/steam. I'll eventually move all my stuff from my Mom's house :P
PWB was quick to suit up and trudge through the snow to the end of the street to see what the heck was going on. The Beauty Salon was burning down. By the afternoon the HVAC place beside it also burned down. The HVAC was the last original building on that street as it's the only building to have survived the uptown fire of 1937.
The fire is now smouldering. In the blizzard. Visibility has been almost zero all day. I didn't really notice the blizzard until the majority of the smoke went away.
Here's a few photos PWB took through the course of the day.
The orange lifty thing has a fire dude in it who is spraying water on the bakery trying to save it. The empty space in front of the lifty thing is where the Beauty Salon was. ( it's actual name was Beauty Salon ). There's a small piece of the front of what was once the HVAC building. This and the next photo were taken at 130pm.
I'm sure it had no bearing on how hard the volunteer fire fighters worked today, but the store on the left is Phil's. Phil is also a volunteer fire fighter. The fire did not reach his store ;)
I found this interesting. In a small village we don't have enough water pressure for fire hydrants to work like you see in the city. Here they fill tanker trucks with water and dump them into what looks like a huge yellow kiddie pool and pump the water from there onto the fire. There was a second pool not shown in this photo. They were constantly replenished.
At the end of the day ( 445) all the smouldering steaming rubble was pushed into a pile. I'll be curious how big the pile is by morning. It's still smoking and steaming now at 145am.
That's it for my show and tell today. I wish I had my film 35mm here. I could have taken some nice photos of it in the dark with the icicles and the smoke/steam. I'll eventually move all my stuff from my Mom's house :P
Comments
06:55 Mon Feb 8th, 2010
Actually, risk of fire is greatly increased in the winter. Simply because more flammable heat sources are in use. Add to that the chemicals in a hair salon and you have a chemical fire that is sure to burn all day, despite your efforts to douse it. All you can do is soak near by buildings in a hope to contain it.
I saw a duplex burn once, one half was a hair salon, the other a computer store. Wow, mix combustible chemicals with toxic electronics, and it's like a fire works show !
13:19 Mon Feb 8th, 2010
@Sturstein - Ps is so right. Here's a crazy one for you. It happened at the tail end of winter in 1997. We had a massive flood that covered 2000 square kilometres, during which part of downtown Grand Forks ND burned down.
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STURSTEIN
02:25 Mon Feb 8th, 2010
Damn. If stuff can burn uncontrollably in that kind of weather, it's easy to see how entire communities Down Under can go up in smoke in a summer bushfire. And we get plenty of those randomly untouched buildings. An entire block can burn to the ground, with the exception of a single house, left virtually untouched.