substitute

someone's smoking or other fire safety issues threw us all out of the hotel this morning. thank you SFFD for dealing with it. back to "normal" now.

http://m.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=3351940168&

THE ACK STEAK HOUSE, PROUDLY SERVING THE FAMOUS AND JUICY PTUIBONE STEAK:



IT'S NATURAL LIGHTER FLUID, YOU KNOW, THE STUFF THAT SQUIRTS OUT OF TREES, SUDDENLY, FATALLY AND PAINFULLY BURNING YOUR SKIN WITH A STICKY NAPALM-LIKE BUT TOTALLY NATURAL GEL:

I was listening to the fire radio in my car last night because I am a dork.

There was an apartment fire, and the fire department got two wrong addresses and a lot of bad information at first, saying it was a storage unit or a shed or a different apartment building. But they got there in less than five minutes anyway, and charged on in to the burning apartment to put out the fire.

Meanwhile, a full "structure fire response" (lots of engines and trucks) from three other cities and the County got there in < 10 minutes. By then the commander had divided the people he had into functional groups and assigned each of the group leaders the people needed to do a task (putting out the fire, ventilating the building, checking upstairs to see if the fire had spread, searching for people in the building.)

Some of the people from the other cities and county were able to help and sped up the process tremendously.

In less than half an hour the fire was out, no one was hurt, only one apartment was badly damaged, and almost all the outside helping people had been sent away.

I am very, very impressed. And this among other things is why the next AIP post will be about the fire department.

From the always reliable exploding aardvark, possibly the best lede of all time:

A jazz musician was injured Friday after jumping from a burning motor home driven by a one-time roller skating stripper from Lodi.

http://www.lodinews.com/articles/2007/02/25/news/4_motorhome_070224.txt

DESERT PARADISE



A flickr set of the Sawtooth fire from btwheeler. It's the Fire Hole.

I ran across this on Flickr. There is a huge crater in Darvaza, Turkmenistan that is full of fire from natural gas that just spews out and burns. Forever.

SEE THE LOVELY CRATER


IT IS FULL OF THE FIRE

VENTURA, Calif. (AP) -- A new study shows that a release of liquefied natural gas from one of four proposed terminals off the Southern California coast could spread a fireball over several miles, but pose no threat on land because the facility would be more than a dozen miles offshore...

TOTALLY SAFE SIX MILE WIDE CLOUD OF FIERY DEATH HERE, FOLKS.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2006/04/18/state/n012001D47.DTL