Friday, May 8, 2009

Alarums and Diversions

The laundromat caught fire this afternoon. Of course, by the time the volunteer fire department got there one of the bank tellers and the guy who owns the welding shop had raced over with fire extinguishers and put it out.

6 comments:

  1. oh my, I hope no one was hurt.

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  2. Good thing they got it out fast.. could have caused a gas explosion

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  3. Sorry, but I laughed out loud. Oh, what we small town people find exciting. When we hear a siren, we all run out to see what's going on (if no one has a scanner handy). Glad they got the fire out quickly.

    Speaking of fire, several members of my husband's family have been evacuated from their homes because of the fire in Santa Barbara County. Last update we got was this morning.

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  4. Small town self-sufficiency! My son's a firefighter and in the city, you tend to have people getting in the way instead of putting the fire out.

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  5. Well, the spousal unit has just gone down to the hardware store (that hotbed of information) so I expect to hear more soon; but it evidently hurt no one and did very little damage.

    Our business district is three blocks long and the laundromat is just down the street from the bank and the welder's. As soon as they saw the smoke, Connie from the bank grabbed an extinguisher and Larry from the welding shop grabbed his, and off they went.

    There was a housefire less than a block from us two years ago and it was pretty much the same; parents at work, teenage boy asleep in one room and two guys driving by in a pickup pulled over, called the fire dept and got the kid out.

    I could wax philosophical about the differences between big cities and small towns but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that everyone in this town is related to everyone else through blood or marriage, or went to school with them, or played Little League ball with them...you don't turn your head and look the other way when you've known the victims since childhood.

    Or is that too simplistic?

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  6. It's not so much that people turn away and ignore what's going on (they don't seem to do that much where I live in a small southern city). I's the one's that interfere. One of my son's coworkers, a former marine, had a guy drive up right behind the engine and block the fire hydrant because he wanted to know "what's happening". Said friend used some of his 'marine language' to get the guy to move. The guy reported him for his 'bad attitude'. The captain was practically ROFL while lecturing him about his attitude.

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