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Monday, July 12th, 2010 A Fiery Weekend Update by Clayton |
I saw smoke on Saturday and decided to go investigate it because I was bored.
As I got close to the source it became apparent that most of Winnipeg's north-west population had decided to come and watch as well. It turns out that a house in the community of Amber Trails (on the street name, appropriately enough, Amber Trail) had caught fire and burned up pretty good. Returning home after the 20 minute crawl through the traffic jam of fellow gawkers and human-tragedy enthusiasts I made the mistake of going to the online newspaper sites to find out exactly what happened.
It turns out there were a lot of fires in Winnipeg this past weekend:
The Amber Trail one was interesting because the Winnipeg Free Press quoted a neighbour who complained bitterly about the response time of the Winnipeg Fire Department. To quote the article,
Jagroop Hayer, who called 911 after seeing smoke from his deck a couple of blocks away, claimed it took firefighters more than 20 minutes to arrive on the scene and once they were there, they didn't seem in any rush to put the fire out.
"This was a disgraceful performance by the fire department. The fire hall is just a 10 minute walk away," he said.
I have to say...Mr. Hayer was clearly looking for his 15 minutes of fame and making outlandish accusations. The original article I read only contained Hayer's comments, but the link above actually contains the rebuttle from the Winnipeg Fire and Paramedic services. It turns out the actual time from the 911 call to the arrival on-scene was 6 minutes and 43 seconds. Hardly 20 minutes.
Now I'm no firefighter (I just play one on TV), but I know enough to know that these guys typically have to drop whatever they're doing when that bell sounds, slide down a really fun pole get dressed in a bunch of heavy gear, hop on their big red truck and race through the legions of morons that were given driver's licenses in this city to get to their fire. The fact that they got there in under 10 minutes I find extremely impressive. I know I couldn't do it.
I'd also imagine that when firefighters arrive at the scene of a fire, the first thing they do is determine if anyone is inside the building. If nobody is inside (as was the case with Amber Trail) I would imagine that they proceed very carefully and time take to examine the situation before rushing headfirst into a raging inferno.
Anyhow, enough about me complaing about the complainer.
I've always found it interesting that events like fires sometimes show up in clusters. Those fires took place in different parts of the city and had different causes; this wasn't simply a string of arsons. I wonder why that is?
As for my earlier statement when I said I "made the mistake" of checking out online news is that I got fairly up-to-date on current issues in Winnipeg, most of which just made me angry. I'll be making posts about them over the next few days.
In other fiery news, I've actually started an overhaul to Claytopia that I'm finally happy with. In the next few weeks I hope to make the transition to Claytopia 3.0!
Not that it matters. Nobody reads this anyway.
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