We’re walking the dog back to the loft around 6:45 p.m. and all of a sudden four fire engines roar past us down Gay St. Oh great, someone pulled the fire alarm in Sterchi again!
But after about two minutes of milling around on the street out in front of our building I realized this wasn’t a false alarm. I told Jay to go grab his camera. I took the dog and crossed the street to get a better view. That’s when I noticed some people pointing up at the sky… I looked up and saw a cloud of dark smoke billowing up from the apartment building next to us.
This was a fire for real.
But it wasn’t a very big fire. Not like the fire in February that destroyed an abandoned warehouse on Jackson St. But when you’ve got a fire in an apartment building, on a street where the buildings are butted up against each other, you can’t take any chances. It was cool to see them raise the ladder.
As Jay was taking pictures, I was rushing up and down the street, dog in tow, trying to get a better view.
Then I realized, DUH, go up on OUR roof and look down on the building next to us.
I ran up to our loft, grabbed my camera and left the dog behind.
I got some decent aerial views of the scene by climbing onto our roof’s deck, laying on my belly and leaning out over the ledge. My camera isn’t as good as Jay’s, but he was down on the ground and I wanted to capture the action up on the roof.
Poking around the scene, originally uploaded by Girl Journalist. See more fire pics: Small fire, Gay St..
I also shot a little video (dangling out of our 8th floor window) of the truck and ladder.
My students from KU’s Multimedia Newsroom, this night reminded me of you… the fried squirrel, the Boardwalk Apartments fire… good times, good times. There is nothing like being first on the scene, no matter how small the fire turns out to be.
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