Fire, 100111

I was about to go to a secondhand bookstore yesterday when I saw some smoke rising in the distance. Decided to check it out, though since the police had diverted the nearby traffic I had to walk two blocks to get close. Turned out a paint store on Gejayan street was caught on fire. When I got there the fire has already somewhat been subdued (these days, leave it to people with camera phones to get the quickest scoop), but nevertheless here's some pictures I took.








        The city garden department will be pretty pissed when they found out.




The show's best seat.



At this point I noticed Naga was also there (he could be seen in the far right side in the above frame), knowing how he always gets very close he'll likely have some interesting images of the event.





I don't have the slightest idea of how firefighters really operate and coordinate with each others, but the way I see it it seems like something along the line of "get all the firetrucks you can find and jam it in one place." There were probably 4-5 firetrucks yesterday with the addition of a pair of police riot-control trucks which I thought was pretty redundant for dealing with one building, not to mention most of them came pretty late into the action. As I said, the fire was pretty much tamed by the time I got there. The aerial ladder truck actually came the latest, and after extending its ladder high it just sat there for about 20 minutes before finally pulling it back down without doing a single thing other than putting a show for everyone to see. Still, better be prepared than not, I guess. And it probably had to do with how we didn't have a decent city hydrant systems, not as far as I know anyway. They had to go back and forth from a nearby small river to get water.

And seriously, could you believe these girls?                          

In the end, thankfully nobody got hurt and the fire didn't spread to the surrounding buildings. Despite what I said, these men really manage to get the job done.