Keystone cops and firemen - a free show out my window

This morning was an unusually noisy one. I live on a busy street that every fire truck in the city seems to use to get from one side of town to the other, so traffic is always pretty loud. For the most part, I am pretty used to it and have learned to go into a pseudo coma in order to get a good night's sleep. At about 5am this morning, however, the fire trucks didn't just go speeding up the street as per usual. Instead, they stopped right in front of my building and for some reason, kept blasting the siren even though they had clearly reached their destination. Even I can't sleep through screeching sirens right under my window.

At first when I woke up, I thought maybe the crazy new alarm system in my building had gone off and the fire department had shown up in response. The system seems to go off if you just think about mentioning the word fire. It is full of bugs that the property owners are trying to work out and all of us in the building have just learned to ignore it. I stuck my head out into the hallway to see what was going on as did several of my neighbors. People in my building wear interesting things to sleep in, by the way. Who knew they made Curious George pajamas that fit adult men?

Eventually after a very sleepy, confused conversation, we all decided that it wasn't our building on fire and the property manager should turn off the stupid alarm, go talk to the firemen and tell them to go away so we could all try to go back to sleep for a while. I watched the manager turn off the alarm but was a little concerned to notice that I could still hear it ringing. Maybe I was developing tintinnitis from the stupid thing? Imagine that - at 35 years old I will spend the rest of my life dealing with ringing ears and hearing loss and screaming 'what?' at people. I followed the manager downstairs so he could talk to the firemen and I could ask them to turn off their stupid siren. When we got outside, I realized that while it was no secret that I am a little crazy, I wasn't imagining things or hallucinating and the ringing was actually coming from an apartment building across the street that really WAS on fire and the sirens were from police cars and an ambulance that were trying to get through the beginnings of rush hour traffic.

Burning buildings are stinky. They reek worse than poopy diapers. The smoke is a nasty black color and because this morning was very foggy, it just hung very low over the street and didn't dissipate. When I opened the front door of the building to see what was happening, my eyes started to sting and there was a nasty chemical taste in my mouth. They say curiosity killed the cat but what about noxious burning buildings killing the neighbors?

I went back up to the sanctuary of my apartment, had a healthy breakfast of chocolate chip cookies and tea, and started watching the show out my window. The buildings on my street are built in the typical San Francisco style: maybe a 6-12 gap exists between buildings, but most are built flush to each other. This means that if one building is on fire, the rest could quickly go up in flames as well. I am sure there are all sorts of building codes that require special materials to be incorporated into the walls to help create firebreaks, but who wants to trust in that? In very short order, all the buildings on that side of the street for my block had been evacuated. I was interested to see that it wasn't just people in my building that sleep in some very interesting things - it seems my whole block is much more creative when it comes to pajamas than I am.

By this time, my street was in chaos. Some police cars had finally blocked off the intersection and were trying to clear up the traffic jam by redirecting drivers to some of the smaller side streets. A few helicopters were buzzing around overhead and now that the buildings were evacuated, the firemen were preparing to go in and save the day.

I can't imagine what kind of nerve it takes to want to be the person that runs into burning buildings as a career choice. I know that firemen wear all kinds of high-tech, protective gear and have a lot of training, but it doesn't change the fact that they are still running into highly dangerous situations on purpose. I have a lot of respect for firemen in general and until this morning, thought the San Francisco fire department was pretty good as well. I still have respect for them for the most part, but what I saw this morning scared me a little bit.

I live on a steeply slanted street which, understandably, makes it difficult to park all of the firetrucks and emergency vehicles needed to rescue people and put out a fire. There are also a lot of leafy trees and power lines. While I was watching some of the firemen put on lots of gear and head into the apartment building, another crew was taking down some tall ladders and trying to lean them up against the side of the apartment building. The first thing that happened was one of the ladders became entangled in some overhead power lines. The two guys holding it started yanking on it and sure enough (big surprise) they snapped a line and pulled it down. Everyone standing in the street started yelling and running away from it and the guys holding the ladder dropped it with a big crash, but nothing happened. Maybe the power had been turned off because of the fire? Or it was actually a telephone line instead of a power line? Who knows.

Eventually, the ladder dudes tried to lean it up against the side of the building again. Hooray, success. Except that due to the steep slant of the street, the ladder kept leaning towards the down side of the hill and falling over. Obviously, this ladder wasn't going to be usable or safe unless they could level it out. One of the men stood there holding up the ladder while the other bent over and started scanning the ground. I think he was looking for something to use as a shim or a wedge, but for all I know he was looking for a dropped contact lens.

While all of this is going on, about 100 people from the various apartment buildings were standing around in their pajamas with their little apartment dogs and cats trying to figure out what was going on. It looked like a few of them went off to one of the local cafes and brought back coffee and donuts for their neighbors, which probably helped them deal with the cold foggy air. I could see a few guys with cameras taking photographs - maybe they were here for the newspaper?

Suddenly, one of the ladder trucks woke up, swiveled around to face the apartment building and started extending. It was kind of like watching one of the Autobots come to life - where was Shia LeBeouf hiding? I checked on the duo trying to balance out their little ladder and noticed that even though it was still crooked, one of them was climbing up it with an axe in his hand. The odd thing was, even though I could see smoke coming out of one of the chimney stacks on the roof, there didn't seem to be any other sign of a fire. This guy's ladder didn't reach up to the roof and I couldn't imagine that he would use an axe to break open a window, so where was he going? And what kind of silly person would climb up an obviously unstable ladder? The ladder on the truck finally reached the roof and two firemen crawled up it to start hacking away at the chimney stack. Yippee, progress at last!

Things were pretty quiet and uninteresting for a while, when all of a sudden a bunch of the cops standing around suddenly started running over to the middle of the street and jumped into a dogpile. I didn't think it was a spontaneous game of street football, but nothing exciting had been happening for a while so maybe they were all bored? Eventually, I could see two police officers lead a man in handcuffs over to the curb and sit him down. After everything had calmed down and all the emergency personnel and firemen had left, I eventually learned that the man lived in the building on fire and had left his dog home while he went out for an early morning run and some breakfast. He was worried about his pet and was trying to get inside to save it. I could understand why the man shouldn't be allowed to run into a burning building, but was it really necessary for so many cops to jump him? There must have been about 10 of them in the dogpile. I appreciate the need to save people from themselves as well as make sure some psycho isn't attacking any of the firemen or EMTs, but maybe that was a little bit of overkill. Just a smidge.

After about three hours, all of the action seemed to be over. The nasty smelling dark cloud of smoke still hung in the air, trapped under the cold gray layer of fog covering the city. People in the street finally began returning to their buildings, probably to get ready for more mundane things like their day jobs. I noticed that the dynamic duo with the wonky ladder seemed to have survived their Keystone Kops routine. I wondered who had given them that particular task as it seemed to add absolutely nothing to the overall process of fighting the fire. Maybe that was the whole point - their chief gave them a (relatively) benign task to keep them out of the way. Granted, they did take down either a power or telephone line, but in general didn't seem to add anything to the list of damages caused by the fire.

It took about another hour for all of the equipment to be loaded back onto the firetrucks and for the police to get traffic flowing normally on the street again, but now everything is pretty much back to normal. A light breeze has started blowing and the fog is slowly starting to break up, so hopefully the noxious smoke will disappear soon too. The sun is starting to shine through it all and it looks like it might even be a warm summer day afterall. A utility truck has just parked itself on the corner to repair the downed wire, so I imagine there might be another minor bottleneck in traffic on the street for a while, but nothing like it was earlier. Everything is quiet again - at least as quiet as it ever is here - and I am starting to feel a bit sleepy. It is time for a catnap before anything else happens.