Comments on: Fire, with more detail and pictures

By: WeeDram

WeeDram — Sun, 08 May 2005 23:53:24 +0000

Must have been pretty intense to see. I saw the results as I had lunch with Mom on Friday at the Garlic Press café. Just passing through, sorry no time to connect. Next time!

WeeDram

By: george.w

george.w — Sun, 08 May 2005 14:47:49 +0000

To the North of the building lay a parking lot, railroad tracks, and then an open area part green grass, part gravel. Besides occasionally hitting the parked cars, the water landed the tracks and the open area. Once it soaked a power pole located between the parking lot and the tracks but that was 100 feet from the building and the plume was going nowhere near it.

A freight train came along later, and the wind direction had shifted to obscure the tracks with an opaque wall of grey smoke. Must have been scary for the engineer but he drove right on through it. The train was a quarter-mile long so it wasn’t like he could stop.

By: Socialist Swine

Socialist Swine — Sun, 08 May 2005 07:32:02 +0000

I’m not a firefighter but I do have some friends who are (and I once passed the entrance test to become a forestry fire-fightin’ type guy) and who’ve often talked to me about what they do. I would guess that they were over-shooting the fire because they wanted a mist to fall over the building to bring down the air temperature and prevent the structure from just exploding into flames.

That or they might have decided that the building was a lost cause and were just trying to prevent the fire from spreading. Was there anything they were hitting with the stream (besides parked cars)?