Close call

This morning, just a little while after 9:00 AM, my printer, without my involvement, seemed to turn itself off and on. Aside waking me up briefly, just long enough to go to the bathroom, I made my way back to sleep and didn't really spend much time thinking about what might have caused my printer to behave so erratically.

When I eventually woke up, about two hours later, one of the first stories I heard on CBC was about a fire in the South end of Halifax (which is where I live). At first I was quite interested as the reporter indicated that the fire was on South Street which runs from near where we live to Dalhousie, and beyond. They eventually mentioned the cross street and the name of an adjacent restaurant, neither of which registered with me, so I assumed that it was on some section of South Street not in the immediate vicinity of our apartment. I then let this fire story slip from my consciousness, aside from the fact that I decided to walk up South to go to school to try to figure out where the fire had taken place.

A little while later, shortly after Rebecca left, she raced back into the apartment to tell us that there was a rather large conflagration just across from our apartment. It seems that the name of the restaurant (Taj Mahal) and cross street (presumably Hollis) really should have registered as they are both visible from some of the apartments in our building.

I was then informed that my printer had turned on because the power had returned, after an outage of about 15 minutes. It was now obvious that the outage had been caused by the near-by fire. Everything started to make sense.

All three of us then decided to head out and see what was happening (and make sure that everything was under control). Fortunately, by the time we figure that there even was a fire, firefighting crews had been on the scene for hours. Amazingly, what we did see, even though there were about 20 fire trucks there, was smoke coming from one of the main doors.



We took a few rather unimpressive video clips of the scene. If these do anything they provide some sense of the scene after more of the flame had been extinguished, but before things had completely wrapped up.



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I guess it is good that my friend moved out of this building about 8 months ago. I really can't imagine how incredibly unpleasant it would be to have to deal with the consequences of a fire in one's building in the middle of Winter.