House went up in flames in my neighborhood (+ aftermath)

I really think this should’ve been posted about two months ago, but oh well, most damage has been fixed, so that’s cool.

Last November sometime in the evening, me and my family started to hear a bunch of fire trucks wailing seemingly coming close. We didn’t think anything of that because we hear emergency vehicles all the time. But then we got a call from a far family friend saying that their old house (the one in my neighborhood) is on fire. We were all like “what?” and I decided to get onto my bike and go down to see what happened, and because a bike-path was connecting our house to the burning house I didn’t get in the way of anyone.

It looked… really bad.

The house, and some of the other houses beside it were completely full of flames, and I was shocked but also in awe because I’ve never experienced something like this in my life. Three fire trucks and once ambulance were on the other end of the culdesac from the burning houses, and half the front was just a gradient of red and yellow. (It also answered my question on whether the sprinkler alarm on the exterior was an MT or an EH from my previous topic, but it was in fact an EH in cont. like I thought so :P) A couple other kids were there too, and after a minute came a few lads in a truck with “ABC News” on it (yes I was in the video for like one second because I was by the bushes, not going to give the clip away because privacy reasons :? :? ). I forgot my phone so I couldn’t take any pictures during the fire, but I did catch a few snaps after they washed out every flame and burn. I’ll get those if people really want them, they’re really far down my photos.

So what happened after? They tarped half the house for a month. THEN they started tearing off the roof exposing the wood RIGHT BEFORE IT SNOWED (intellegence → 1000) But finally from December to today (it snowed again today so cool-cool) they fixed up most of the burn marks, added another section of the house, and now it looks like a whole new home now. (The EH apparently died during the fire, so now it’s a Gentex Commander 3 with a red strobe, RIP)

So have you guys ever experienced anything like this?

Not really… I mean, my drug dealer neighbors decided to have a knife fight and burn their garage down, but that’s about it.

Nope, except for when I used to live in Indiana we had several DUI car v. telephone pole crashes either on my property or on my old neighbor’s property that required the lifeflight helicopter from Fort Wayne to land in my neighbor’s yard. We heard this tremendous rumble and looked outside to see a helicopter hovering over our house and emergency vehicles lined up down the street. Where I’ve lived in Ohio for nearly 4 years now we’ve never had anything too exciting happen given I live in a relatively safe area; there’s no crime that really happens and not too many fires either. I live in a development where all the houses are from 2012 or newer (mine was the second built after the Model; a “spec house” so to speak) so there’s not a lot of risk if stuff happening; although a supercell came through in November and uprooted and felled some trees in my front yard and ripped off a piece of metal siding from my house near my roof from the 100+ mph winds, and we also had no power for two days afterwards.

Back when I used to live in Livonia’s Burton Hollow subdivision, I recall two instances where house fires broke out; one on the street I lived on, and one about a block over where I used to live. One fire, I believe, was contained to a home’s kitchen, and the other fire was confined to the attic.

Somewhere between late 2013-early 2014, when my family and I lived in Livonia’s Brookside subdivision, the house right behind ours caught on fire when its roof was struck by lightning during severe thunderstorms in the area. I was living on-campus at Eastern Michigan University during this time, so I never got to witness the fire for myself. The house was vacant for several months until contractors started clean-up and repairs to the structure; it has since been reoccupied.

Closest thing for me was probably the Station Nightclub, as it was one of the worst disasters the state had and it happened during a time I was emotionally troubled.

All that’s happened in my neighborhood as far as emergencies is the paramedics showing up at people’s houses on plenty occasions as there are plenty of elderly people in my neighborhood.

All that happened in my neighborhood is a appartement catching fire (saw the fire trucks coming) located at the ground floor of a old 1970’s tower block that (earlier, in 2008-ish IIRC) nearly got destroyed by a scooter fire (some people tried to steal a scooter, they couldn’t so of course they burned it down)… But there was also other fires (expect I didn’t found any articles covering them)… So yeah.

Also there was two abandoned buildings that got burned down in 2014, again given that my hometown is kinda small (in terms of population, there’s a lot of vast forest surrounding the town… so if a fire were to break in the forest we would be screwed…).

As far as emergencies in my neighborhood, the only thing we tend to see is the paramedics coming to rush somebody to the hospital and nothing else.