Monday, November 06, 2006

 

This morning, the house on the other side of the road, a house which has been there for as long as I can remember and even longer, burned down. I have been inside that house, more than once, I knew the people who lived there. It was a part of my life and now it's gone.

Let's backtrack a bit to Sunday. I had been taking an afternoon nap, which I do whenver I have the time, as I'm a nocturnal creature. I took the nap, only to be woken up by the wail of sirens. Fire sirens. I got up, looked out of the front door and saw a column of smoke rising up somewhere nearby. I later learned that a garden house had burned down a ten minutes walk away. Police says it was arson.

So far, so good. In the evening, I watched The Onedin Line, one of the best TV shows ever made, which is currently being rerun on a regional channel. Unfortunately, it happened to be the one episode I most dreaded seeing, the one where poor Anne Onedin dies in childbirth. I cried my eyes out, even though this time around I knew what would happen. Later, I switched on my PC (which is still acting up), waited for the latest episode of Torchwood to become available in the usual places, started the download and went to bed. As I didn't have to be at the university or anywhere else today, I decided to watch Torchwood in the early morning hours and set the alarm accordingly. The Torchwood episode (more on that later) was utterly stunning but also emotionally gutwrenching, which on top of an emotionally gutwrenching episode of The Onedin Line was not the best thing to go back to sleep on. Hence I logged onto the internet to get myself back to a somewhat normal emotional state and see what everybody else had to say on the Torchwood episode for that matter. I was on the net for maybe five minutes when the fire sirens went off.

It was 6:24 and my first thought was, "Not again." I did my best to ignore the sirens and was successful for maybe five minutes, before there were more sirens, this time those of firetrucks. And gasps of horror and voices downstairs and on the street outside. Leaving my PC on and connected to the net, I finally decided to go downstairs, still in my pyjamas, to see what was up. And opened the front door to see the house on the other side of the road ablaze.

A bit of information is in order: The house in question is a former farm house, though the farm has been inactive for fifteen years or more. There is the main house, two floors with space for two families, though only the first floor is occupied at the moment. And there are the former stables and barns, which are currently used for storing camping trailers and the like. The part of the complex that was on fire was the bit connecting the main house to the barn, which incidentally also houses the furnace. The house is heated by wood, the people were never particularly scrupulous regarding the type of wood they used and their bloody furnace almost caused a fire some two or three years ago.

The fire brigade was already present by the point, in fact the school and bank parking lots were ablaze with flashing blue lights. However, the fire trucks tried to approach the fire from the other side, which didn't work, because they didn't have enough room to maneuver. Meanwhile, on my side of the fire, there was this huge open field (which separates my house from the one that burned down and is probably responsible for the fact that I wasn't totally scared the fire would spread to my home the whole time) with plenty of room for plenty of fire trucks. Except that the bloody fire brigade didn't seem to know it existed.

The fire brigade in my part of town is made up entirely of volunteers (hence the sirens), but they're usually pretty effective. And in case of severe fires (like this one), they are supported by the volunteer fire brigades of the neighbouring districts. However, for some reason, all the various fire brigades did for a full twenty minutes was sit around on the school and bank parking lots doing absolutely nothing. At least the local fire brigade should have known about the field, particularly considering that the former owner of the burning farmstead (who died in February and gladly did not have to see this) used to be the chief of the volunteer fire brigade. After twenty minutes, finally, a small truck (just a van really, not one of the big ones with ladders) showed up on our side of the fire to scout around. It was soon joined by another firevan and a bunch of firemen standing around still doing fuck all!. Almost an hour until they finally started rolling out the hoses.

By now, the fire had all but consumed the middle part of the building and spread to the adjacent barn. The main house was still safe because there was a firewall between it and the middle part. By the time, the firemen had gotten their hoses connected (the nearest fireplugs were at both ends of the street respectively, i.e. quite far away, which leaves me more than just a little worried) and were ready to start spraying water, the roof of the barn was entirely ablaze and even the roof of the main house had started burning.

By now, it was gradually getting light, and the street was filled with neighbours. Lots of them were annoyed that the fire brigade so totally screwed up, one woman even openly confronted a fireman about it ("The problem is we didn't have enough water", the fireman confessed). And everybody was speculating whether the fire was what we call "hot demolition" round these parts, i.e. whether the owners of the house set the fire themselves. The whole estate is at the center of an inheritance dispute, which speaks for the theory. What speaks against the theory is that the couple living there was apparently still asleep when the fire brigade arrived. I actually have their phone number, but I never thought of calling them, because frankly I couldn't imagine anyone not waking up from the fire and the ruckus made by the fire brigade. Relatives of the owners showed up (it's a big, far-flung, messy family), including the nephew and the obviously distraught niece (she spent much of her childhood in that house). I offered her a cup of tea (I happened to have some brewing) before her brother took her to her grandparents.

I got out my digital camera and took photos until I had exhausted my battery. I'm not even sure why I did it, documentary urge, coming to terms with the fact that the farmhouse that had always been there won't be there any longer. Maybe I'll post my pictures on flickr or one of those sites, once I can figure out how they work. Meanwhile, here are a bunch of fire photos from a regional news service. Those photos were taken from the other side of the house, somewhat closer to the fire. There even was some footage in the local TV news and mention on the radio. And they closed down the B51 road for a while because of the smoke, even though we were much closer to the fire (though luckily smoke free due to the wind blowing from the other direction). One of the neighbours started spraying his fence and garden shed with water, because he was scared that flying sparks might set his own house ablaze.

By half past eight, everything was largely over, though a few firemen still hung around and they still closed down the local elementary school (much to the rejoicing of the neighbourhood kids) because it was too close to the site of the fire. The house was saved, though part of the roof is gone and the upper appartment must have been badly affected by smoke. The middle part was gone except for the brick walls, the roof of the barn is entirely gone with blackened beams reaching out into the autumn sky. The other ancillary buildings (a former stable converted to a party room and a separate house on the premises) were saved. Later in the day, the police arrived, probably to do some arson investigation. Even later, we got a some people covering the damaged part of the roof with plastic sheets and a bulldozer knocked down the remnants of the totally burned out middle part, probably because it was in danger of collapsing.

And now it's dark, and I can't see the gutted farmstead anymore, though I can see the lights from the school gym through the gap left by the burned down middle part. And I'm scared of going to bed, because I don't know how well I can sleep, just in case we do have a mad arsonist in the area (remember that other fire in the garden house). I guess I'll leave the light on, just in case.

posted by Cora link 18:54