So recently my apartment suffered a small fire. It started after some pipe soldering to fix a leak made the wall catch on fire. While I have lived through a number of floods (don’t ask), this was my first fire, and I’ve got to say, the end result looks a lot like those floods I’d been through.
But really it’s the events leading up to the actual fighting of the fire that amaze me most. I got home the evening of the fire and started fixing dinner (leftovers of some sort). Through the process I kept hearing banging from the apartment above. I just thought it was our noisy neighbor moving furniture. Finally, the banging started to get louder and it seemed to also be coming from outside my door as well. I decided to check it out. When I opened my apartment door (I live on the ground floor), the place was teeming with firemen – we’re talking at least a dozen. The cops were also there (since they’d had to close off the street for the multiple fire engines to get by). After staring in a bit of shock for a minute or two (and wondering why there was no fire alarm going off), I finally asked one of the firemen what was going on. He said there was a fire in the building. I asked if they needed to get in to my unit and when he saw where I lived he said ‘Um, yeah, the fire has spread to your unit.’ Maybe it was the ‘Um, yeah’ that kept me calm, but I happily let them in to investigate. They were very nice about it – asking me if there was anything I wanted from the bathroom before they tore down the wall (all I could think to take was my stupid Crest Spinbrush).
It turned out that the firefighters had to tear down the wall between my bathroom and the neighbors’ apartment, since that was the source of the fire. They then sprayed through the wall with their industrial-strength hoses, effectively flooding my bathroom and part of my bedroom. And it doesn’t end there – they then had to break in to the units above ours, since the fire had moved up the wall. After breaking through my bathroom ceiling and spraying even more water down from above, the final damage was complete.
After a week in a hotel, I’m back in. Looks pretty good, but it does annoy me that our landlord won’t pay for our food and transportation costs (the hotel was not in the most easy to access spot). And this is AFTER we agreed to renew our lease. Why is it Boston landlords are so frustrating to deal with? Maybe because all the buildings are falling apart.
Oh well, I guess this whole ordeal could have been a lot worse – we could have owned, instead of rented. Though I should be happy that the Cambridge fire department is so eager to save my building… although I suspect maybe they just had no better fires to fight that night.
