Fire!

Early Sunday morning around 2:00 AM, we were sleeping peacefully when we were woken up by a ridiculously loud banging noise. After the first loud bang, I rolled over and said, "what the heck was that?" This was closely followed by two more loud bangs. Irritated that someone was making so much noise in the middle of the night, I got up to close the windows. I closed the first one and moved to the second. I happened to peek between the blinds as I did so and thought something seemed out of place. It took a minute for my half-sleeping brain to process what was happening. Through our bedroom windows, I could see the neighbors' houses facing ours. On one of them, I could see flames reflecting on their windows.

So I said, "I think someone's house is on fire." Then, as that thought sunk in, I said, "SOMEONE'S HOUSE IS ON FIRE!!!" and started scrambling around for clothes. Dave got up as I ran down the stairs (and fell down the last few) and rushed outside. From the reflection on the windows, I thought the building directly south of ours was the one on fire, but when I got outside, I realized that it was the next building south of that. I felt slight relief that there wasn't really a chance of the fire spreading to our building. Several of the other neighbors were already outside and I could hear one of them on the phone with a dispatcher, so there wasn't really much for us to do except stand around and watch.

Apparently one of the neighbors who lives across the lawn from us has a dog that woke them up, freaking out about something. So the kids got up to see why the dog was acting crazy and discovered the fire. The two kids and their mom rushed around and started banging on peoples' doors to wake them up—including the man who lived in the burning house. He got out without a problem, as did the neighbors on both sides.

The fire was located in the garage. We suspect that the loud noise that woke us up was the garage ceiling falling in. We stood and watched as the fire devoured the man's truck and the ceiling fell in more and fed the fire. The fire department arrived 5-10 minutes after we got outside and they quickly doused the flames. We went back inside because, once the fire was out, it was pretty cold out on the wet lawn. We laid in bed for more than an hour, listening to the firefighters work and waiting for the adrenaline to settle down so we could go back to sleep.


Needless to say, it was a pretty restless night. Dave lay awake thinking, "I wish I had taken my camera out to get photos of the fire." I lay awake thinking, "If our garage lights on fire, we wouldn't know because there isn't a smoke alarm in that part of the house." We have learned our lessons. Dave will always remember to bring his camera when crazy things happen—even if it seems a little insensitive at the time—and I will be purchasing another smoke detector this week to install in our kitchen by our garage door.