There are exciting things that make you smile and then there are exciting things that you can quite frankly live without thankyouverymuch. Tonight I experienced the latter when I stood up, glanced out the window and saw five fire trucks, three police cars, an ambulance, a Hydro-Quebec vehicle, and a whole herd of emergency response personnel milling about.
I’m still not sure what’s going on. Whatever it was that happened, it happened at the building across the street (thank GOD because I would have been frantically waking the kids up and getting their shoes on if it had been our building!). Some of the people in the building were put onto a city bus that sat outside so that they’d be warm and comfortable, but I can see other people still in the building coming out on their balconies or peering out windows so clearly it wasn’t any raging fire – plus, no smoke.
I had also thought maybe it was a potential gas leak, especially when I saw that the street had been taped off, but again there were still people inside the building so it didn’t seem that likely. When the electric company showed up that didn’t seem to make sense for gas either (although I don’t know why they were there either since there didn’t seem to be a power failure).
George wasn’t home so I had to call him to tell him what was going on. When I took the dog down to pee I could see that if you were coming up the street there would be no way of knowing where the problem was since many emergency vehicles were right in front of our building. I know how panic-inducing it can be to see a bunch of cops and firefighters in front of your home so I let him know we were fine and that it was across the street.
As of now everything is calming down. There seems to be one fire truck left and the ambulance, but everyone else has left and it seems business as usual.
It’s just really creepy to find a large portion of your city’s emergency people right outside. I’m glad everyone seems to be fine! I can definitely pass on this type of excitement!
It is probably comparing apples and oranges (don’t you hate that?) BUT sometimes when an emergency number is called the end result is dispatching everybody but the baker who, hopefully, is making tomorrow’s donuts.
Exciting after you know that there has been no people killed.
I used to live in a city and the sirenes would go all the time.
In the beginning i kept hoping nobody would ever be hurt and they were all false alarms.
If you would count all the call outs and if they all would be valid ones, the city would be like a war zone and everybody would have died.
However most must have not been that valid, which is a good thing, so I could ignore them and no longer get upset.
The things we get used to.
I’d go ahead and guess Carbon Dioxide call. They’d have to dispatch fire and ambulance with that one. The police would also respond to help with traffic in a bigger building case like that one. If it would have been gas, the residents wouldn’t have sat on a bus just in front of the building. Everyone, likely your building included, would have been evacuated from the block of the street. FireDad has been on 5 CO2 calls in the past two shifts. Bad time of year for it.