Fire!

March 24, 2009 - Day 83

Traffic was a snarled mess and hundreds of people were wandering around aimlessly confused on the downtown streets after work today. You’d have thought it was the end of the world. It wasn’t the end of the world - but the rumor was that a restaurant on Rice Howard Way was on fire. A city block in all directions surrounding the restaurant was blocked off.

I was going to get closer to take a picture of the fire but I couldn’t even leave through the doors on the south side of our building (which is the street that I normally catch my bus on). Police officers were carefully guarding the area and there was no getting a little closer.

Nobody seemed to know where we should catch our busses that normally travel along the area that was blocked off but I went around a corner from my regular stop on 102 Avenue and waited on 101 Street as one police officer suggested (although he wasn’t certain that my bus would come that direction). The bus came that way but wasn’t going to stop until a few of us waiting in the same spot flagged him down. Once on the bus, it wasn’t the usual quick exit out of the downtown core. We crawled through the streets of downtown at a snail’s pace and I was beginning to feel trapped.

I watched the news before I posted this picture and I learned that fire crews will be on the scene for several hours; that the fire has been contained and there are no injuries to report. The building is a turn-of-the century building with seven tenants, not only the restaurant as I’d heard. They showed some amazing pictures of huge flames shooting out of the upper story windows when the fire was at its worst.