This is not a drill 🔥
I have experienced my first ever holy-shit-this-is-not-a-drill emergency. Real fire. Fire! 🔥
I’ve never actually been in true emergency mode before in my entire life. I have never been in a situation where “panic” was on the menu.
I did not panic. Yay me. High fives.
It started with an explosion, way more than a backfire. I ran to the window. It was dark and raining outside, so I couldn’t see anything until I actually opened the window and leaned out… and got a face full of black smoke.
There was a fire below my apartment. Not off to one side, but directly below, somewhere in the several storeys under my feet. The smoke was so thick that I could not see anything except that it was rushing straight up at me. About the only thing I could see for sure is that it was not the floor right below me.
“Remember your training,” I thought. I have prepared. I have fire-drilled.
I ran to the bedroom and grabbed a smoke mask, easily accessible right beside the bed for sleepy-mode emergencies. As I considered what might be unfolding below me, I felt extremely grateful to strap that thing to my face, knowing that it would provide substantial protection if the halls and stairs were full of smoke.
Given that the fire was at least 2 floors below, I judged it was non-insane to grab more things, rather than sprinting for the stairs in my socks. In about ninety seconds I had my “go bag” and several valuables, and I was ready for outdoors.
Still no fire alarm! And no heat or smoke in the hall. My neighbours were emerging from their apartment. They had heard “something,” but did not know anything serious was happening … and were clearly struggling to believe me as I urged them to hustle down the stairs.
Then the fire alarm started.
And the “emergency” was mostly over for me within seconds of getting outside. The fire trucks had already arrived, and the fire was one of the least serious fires possible … while still being an actual fire sending torrents of smoke up to my windows.
It was a car fire, in a parking spot underneath the edge of the building, directly under a ground floor apartment but not actually inside the building. Uncontrolled, it might conceivably have ignited the building, but probably not. An adjacent car’s paint job got badly blistered.
The explosion? The tires popping in the heat. Almost simultaneously, apparently.
But for about three minutes there, I had every reason to treat it like the true emergency it might have been, and it was exciting. I could have even been the one to pull the fire alarm! But I was too busy trying to convince my neighbours to take the situation seriously. I was trying to alarm just them, when I probably should have been trying to alarm everyone in the damned building.
A few years ago, a friend of a friend was killed by a fire below his apartment, driven off his balcony by the heat and smoke inside. And that is what I was thinking of as I raced through my checklist.
Get a proper mask for serious smoke, and put it somewhere highly accessible. Single most neglected piece of home safety equipment. I recommend RZMask.com.