Today's excitement

[lordshipmayhem]

I'm on the bus to get to work and pass by a huge fire scene. The building was (note "was") on the opposite side of the block immediately north of where I work: They had the HazMat truck parked directly across the street from us, which was kind of unnerving. And my office was directly downwind of the fire, which means my clothes still have a faint smokey smell.

The fire, for those of you not in Toronto, distroyed a 3-storey building built in 1913. The structure, wood frame with brick veneer like so many built prior to the First World War, housed a paint store with apartments above. The two buildings on either side shared a common basement with the fire structure, which meant that all three kind of went.

The alarm went out at about 2:00 in the morning.

The call, as you'd expect from a century-old building with dry-as-a-bone wood stud walls and tons of volatile paint and thinners and fabric (oh my), resulted in a 7th alarm. (In Toronto, the first alarm is two pumpers and a ladder truck, and grows by three pumpers and another ladder truck with each subsequent alarm. That means this scene needed 160 men from 40 fire stations using 20 pumpers, seven ladder trucks, two heavy rescue trucks, one Hazardous Materials ("HazMat") truck, seven platoon chiefs, a battalion chief, an incident command vehicle and two trucks whose sole purpose in life is to haul around those tanks of air firefighters have strapped to their backs, and basically anything else the battalion chief can think of to throw at the situation. And anything he wants, if it exists anywhere in Southern Ontario, he gets.) They had units there from Etobicoke to Scarborough. The worry was that they'd lose the whole damned block: rows of ancient 3-storey buildings in similar brittle condition, two ancient factory buildings each about 7 storeys tall and one occupied with residences, a Honda dealership filled with gassed-up-and-ready-to-go-(er, boom) cars, and scariest of all, a gas station right across the street from a substantial condo complex.

Come noon, some 10 hours later, they were still pouring tons of water on the structure. Early on in the incident they'd moved all trucks and crews away from in front of the building just in case the rest of the thing decided to collapse.

The good news:
1) nobody was killed
2) the only one hurt (a firefighter fell off a ladder) was back at work and fighting the fire by 6:30 that morning
3) the fire department managed to save the foundation. :P

The bad news:
1) when I left for home at shortly after 5:00, they still had about four firefighting vehicles, the street was still blocked off, the ambulance bus was still there (the large ambulances had left), and people were still not able to return to their homes in the buildings on either side of the three involved in the fire.
2) One woman who was burned out is supposed to have her wedding in two weeks. They've not only lost their accommodations, they've also lost some of their wedding presents. (Not her wedding dress, which is at the store for safekeeping. She'll probably need new shoes though.)
3) The roof and rear wall are both gone in the building at the heart of the fire.

Comments

[tamakun.livejournal.com]

This was the fire, correct? Geez, that was right around the corner from S+L, too...

That fire was insane, considering the damage it did...

[lordshipmayhem.livejournal.com]

That was it. My office is located on the next block south, right across the street from that white building you see in the background.

The HazMat truck was parked in front of that white building.