30 Firefighters Outside My House

Around lunch time today, the lights in our place started flickering. Really bad. We've seen occasional flicker before, which I chalk up to shitty, outdated electrical in and around our house, but nothing like this. There was even this really scratchy static zappy sound coming out of the tv. Scratchy, electrical. Not good, not good.

Then, the sirens came. And flashing lights. And the crowd of fire department, Verizon folks, and the electrical folks started to gather.

Across the street, a Verizon utility box was spewing out nasty, brown smoke into the air. Perhaps something had shorted out inside, but it was clearly on fire on the inside. Problem was, it was somehow tied to the electrical, which meant using conditional water spray was a big no-no. Further to that, it was right at the edge of the sidewalk, where three cars were parked, the owners not in site.

The box smoked for a good half hour, before finally a couple of firefighters got in there and busted it open. That's when the huge brown cloud was set free. The box continued to smoke for while, and at some point, water was used to blast the area. I saw a quick flare up right below the back of one of the cars - but quickly extinguished.

At some point our crazy hermit landlord ran outside, pissed as hell. The firemen had attempted to get him to come to the door by ringing the bell several times, and when he didn't come, they broke the lock off something to access our basement (emergency electrical shutoff, perhaps?). All it took was a good ax hit and he came out, yelling at everyone, calling it discrimination, and pissed in general that he had to be outside.

I'm not sure what exactly happened with our place - as the blinky blinky of the lights continued, I went around and shut off the lights, unplugged tvs. After a walk outside to talk to the fire fighters, I came back to find that our hallway absolutely reeked of some kind of electrical smell. We had to crack the windows open for a while before it finally dispersed.

Needless to say, we decided it was best to keep an eye on the situation here this afternoon. As of this writing, it's been about 8 hours, and the Verizon teams are still outside working. Power seems to be back on fine, but all the phone lines around here are down. And then there's these loud, diesel engines, just outside our apartment!

Check out a clip from it, that's the landlord shouting about 19 seconds in.

Warm Temperatures Set My Building On Fire

Nice weather this past weekend. Parts of Saturday were gorgeous. Made for some good strollin' and joggin' times. And whadayaknow: my workplace building was on fire, and there's one less Japanese restaurant in the city now.

Now I'm not one to speculate, but I overheard part of a conversation from my boss to the building manager. Apparently, a fire broke out Sunday morning at Yakitori East, the everything Japanese restaurant located on the northern face (backside) of our building (44th St.). Believed cause is electrical. (Yikes for me!) No one was eating, no one was there.

As a result, the building smelled a little bit funky yesterday. The other two Japanese restaurants in our building, Sakagura and Totto, remained closed Monday and should open up tonight. Haven't heard one way or another on Yakitori East - no signs in the glass-less windows (which were open for a bit yesterday, closed by the metal protective gate today). No idea whether they'll try to reopen it or move elsewhere.

The other thing was that all the bathroom locks were busted out with axes by the fire department. Our own guys room just has a loose handle now. But the ladies room? No handle! Just push and go.