Fighting fires
...real ones!
I was sitting in the lounge at the hostel talking with a friend when somebody casually walked in and said there was a fire. After walking out into the hallway to see somebody smash the extinguisher cabinet and set off the alarm it seemed there actually was one.
I hurriedly went back to the lounge and packed my laptop into my bag (insert joke about my most treasured possessions here), slung it on my back and then went to see if I could help.
One of the staff members was trying to fight it but the little fire extinguishers lasted about 3 seconds and had no permanent affect. A bunch of the hostellies sorted out the firehose so we grabbed that and trained it on the flames through a broken internal window. (Yes we did ask the question about whether it was an electrical fire but went ahead anyway...) I had a quick look through the window and it was fairly clear that the seat of the fire was inside the wall and the firehose wasn't going to be much use because the angle was wrong.
At this point the fire department turned up and took over so I left and went outside. A bunch of us stood around feeling rather cold while watching the fire staff do their job. It was a bit interesting when one of them purposely walked into the hostel carrying a chainsaw!
You'll have to forgive the blurriness of this photo. It was cold enough that I was shivering a little. This is Jesus in front of one of the fire trucks.
10-20 minutes later everything seemed fine but the staff said the fire captain was checking things before letting us back in so we wandered off to the local Irish pub and had a beer or two - as you do at times like these...
I was sitting in the lounge at the hostel talking with a friend when somebody casually walked in and said there was a fire. After walking out into the hallway to see somebody smash the extinguisher cabinet and set off the alarm it seemed there actually was one.
I hurriedly went back to the lounge and packed my laptop into my bag (insert joke about my most treasured possessions here), slung it on my back and then went to see if I could help.
One of the staff members was trying to fight it but the little fire extinguishers lasted about 3 seconds and had no permanent affect. A bunch of the hostellies sorted out the firehose so we grabbed that and trained it on the flames through a broken internal window. (Yes we did ask the question about whether it was an electrical fire but went ahead anyway...) I had a quick look through the window and it was fairly clear that the seat of the fire was inside the wall and the firehose wasn't going to be much use because the angle was wrong.
At this point the fire department turned up and took over so I left and went outside. A bunch of us stood around feeling rather cold while watching the fire staff do their job. It was a bit interesting when one of them purposely walked into the hostel carrying a chainsaw!
You'll have to forgive the blurriness of this photo. It was cold enough that I was shivering a little. This is Jesus in front of one of the fire trucks.
10-20 minutes later everything seemed fine but the staff said the fire captain was checking things before letting us back in so we wandered off to the local Irish pub and had a beer or two - as you do at times like these...
posted by Edward Sargisson at 7:32 am
2 Comments:
Gosh. Well, at least Canada is showing you an exciting time. No snow?
Oh, there was snow on Saturday night which made running on Sunday rather interesting.
The snow's mostly gone now but there are patches of ice around which are more dangerous.
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