Fire

I woke up Friday and heard a smoke alarm in a robot voice saying “emergency, evacuate!, emergency, evacuate!”. It was going off for about 30 minutes before I was awake enough to realize what it was. I threw on clothes and ran downstairs to figure out which condo it was coming from. It was coming from #43, the condo under mine. There was thick black smoke coming from under his door. I looked down the hall and realized that nobody at my entire end of the building would be home on a weekday, so I called 911 and reported the fire, then I went back inside and grabbed some stuff before the smoke was too think to see or breathe. I ran to Jeff & Shannon’s condo and took their dog  out to my car, and within a few minutes, 5 fire trucks where there, and they set off the building wide alarm, which made everyone else evacuate (I forgot to pull the alarm on my way out!).

After a while, they put the fire out. Evidently my neighbor Adam’s dog had chewed a laptop battery, which exploded, and lit the carpet on fire. Had I not been home, it would have burned his condo, then mine, and then everyone else’s, because there was nobody home in the 20 or so condo’s at our side of the building.