stop, drop and roll!
well, i was planning on writing to you all about the polar plunge, but we had some events yesterday afternoon that outrank that.
yesterday was a typical monday for the most part. i dragged my butt to work at 5:45am and bumbled through the day dreading my SCUBA homework. after work i was in the rec office working on said homework when i heard hubbub in the hallway. this is not totally out of our realm here, so i didn’t really pay attention to it. not until mandi came to the door of the office in a panic and yelled to me “call the firehouse, my clothes are on fire!”
now, its not that i didn’t believe mandi, i was just wary of her exaggerating i guess. i turned to stacey and said “is she bullshitting me?” so stacey went out to look. not 10 seconds later do i hear stacey yell to me “she’s not lying, call!!!”
i pick up the phone, and my first reaction is to call “2555″ which is the number to the firehouse dispatch. however, i came through my winter moment and dialed “911″ which is the emergency number for the firehouse. not that i would get a different dispatcher, but apparently as soon as a “911″ call rings there are bells and whistles going off and the firefighters are on a truck getting ready to go before they know where they’re going to.
vanessa, the woman who works dispatch, answered “firehouse, what’s the nature of your emergency”
i respond with something like “hi vanessa, i don’t know if this is an emergency…wait, mandi, is that fire out now?” as i could hear them using the fire extinguisher in the room next door.
“who is calling please?” says the voice on the other end of the phone.
“oh, its emily. there was a fire in the dryer, but i think we have it out now.”
“and where are you located?”
“building 155, the laundry room.”
“i’m sending them out to check on it.”
“thanks vanessa!”
after this phone exchange, i go out to investigate the problem next door. there is smoke pouring through the hallway. people are bent over so as not to choke on the smoke. i, of course, am trying to find someone with a camera to take a picture of the dryer door which is nicely melted.
nearly 5 minutes later, the fire alarms go off, so we evacuate the building. outside we see that the fire truck is at the main laundry room at the other end of the building, next to the galley. julie runs up to tell them that it was the laundry room in highway 1, and they make their way down to the wreckage in the laundry room.
thanks to the quick thinking of mandi, simone and jason they put the fire out before it got very big.
now, the story i got was that mandi went to get her laundry when the buzzer went off to signal that it was done. when she opened the door flames were leaping out at her. so she closed it and went to get jason. from there the details are fuzzy, but i know that we all had a part in saving the station. (as ryan calls it - the ASS award - antarctic station saver).
of course, roughly 5 minutes after it all happened, everyone on station knew about it and it will be the talk of town for a while. people said they were almost excited when they saw the flashing lights because that meant there was something going on in town other than the normal everyday crap.
one of the weirdest things was coming back into the building as they were trying to blow the smoke out with fans. they had all the doors to the outside open, and you could see your breath inside. this was my first experience with that.
mandi lost a good portion of her clothing in the fire, so i started a mini clothing drive for her. lucky for her, none of her issued clothes burned.
on a really nice note, the hallway smells like a campfire every time you come into the building. this place is devoid of smells, so our noses are wicked sensitive to it now.
no one was hurt in the making of this anecdote.