One of my earliest childhood memories is being put down to sit on the front lawn of a neighborhood house that was afire on the third floor/attic, as my dad and other people hurriedly carried out furniture and valuables from the first floor. I don’t think I was even old enough to walk. I don’t remember the fire department arriving, but I’m sure it did - the house is still there.
I’m about a mile or so off the highway, and one day heard a huge CRASH!
Two full-sized pickups, both with heavily loaded trailers had a head-on collision. Shortly after impact, one of them caught fire, burning the three guys inside (probably already dead). Thick, nasty black smoke. That sucked.
When I was a kid, the family were all sleeping in an overhead camper when the truck stated belching smoke from under the hood (Fucking Chevy!). Thankfully, somebody saw it and knocked on the camper door, waking Dad up.
“Uh, excuse me, I hate to wake you up, but I think your truck is on fire.” 
My old man almost got mad at him for not yelling “FIRE!” loudly.
That could have ended badly.
My friend’s van roof was partially collapsed when that place went up. He lived clear down at Trop/Boulder! :eek:
Over the years, two (!) of my neighbors torched their own homes. Neither was very sophisticated about it (who is months behind on their mortgage AND stores their pictures and valuables offsite hours before a fire? And who manages to be visiting relatives at 1 am on a school night with children under 10? NO ONE.)
I also had a workplace to catch fire. It was repaired but took months, the makeshift quarters were suboptimal, to say the least. My ledgers were smoke damaged but not destroyed, thankfully. Not sure how I would have recovered otherwise.
No one hurt in any of the fires recounted above.
My first year at university we had to evacuate the dorm because the laundry next door caught on fire.
A family business burned down, but was rebuilt.
I used to work in the oil field and someone set one of our oil tanks alight. That was super, arriving there and finding a giant ball of flame.
And, worst, the teenage daughter of one of my cousins died in a house fire.
I’ve not had much truck with fires so far, knock on Formica. The best I can do is a hotel we stayed at, the Royal Jomtien Resort Hotel in Jomtien, just south of Pattaya proper on Thailand’s East Coast, in 1994. The wife’s college had an annual retreat/meeting each year, and that year it was there. I tagged along. Three years later, some gas canisters improperly stored – extremely common in Thailand – exploded in the ground floor kitchen. Fire swept through the high-rise, killing 91 guests due mainly to the fire escapes being locked, also a common occurrence in Thailand. Another 11 civilian fire volunteers died in a traffic accident while rushing to the scene, bringing the total number of deaths caused by the fire to 102.
The fire received worldwide coverage. I recall seeing live footage of a helicopter trying to rescue a farang (Western) mother and daughter, while the big photo on both Thai- and English-language newspapers the next day was this farang man carrying a Thai lady to safety.
The hotel is still operating, although I think under a slightly altered name. I walked past it last October. Hope they’ve unlocked their fire escapes, but I doubt it.
The story of the fire is here.
Twenty five-ish years ago, a few days before xmas, I stopped at a local bar to pick up a sixpack. A local cop came in and spoke with the bartender, who pointed out a very drunk woman.
Turns out she had left a baby, a two year old, and a four year old alone at her apartment with xmas candles burning. All three died in the fire. I purposely avoided following the story after hearing the initial report.
Christmas 1986 - we were staying with my pregnant sister with our toddler daughter. In the middle of the night, we woke and my husband realized the gawd-awful shrieking was from the smoke alarm. He chased the rest of us out to the car while he and my brother-in-law went to the basement to deal with the fire. Somewhere in there, my sister called 911.
Turned out, my BIL had dumped ashes from their wood stove into a cardboard box, not realizing there were still hot embers. The box ignited and lit the vertical blinds across the basement patio doors. My husband found the fire extinguisher while my BIL burned his hands carrying the flaming box out into the snow. By the time the fire dept showed up, it was just a stinky, smoky mess that needed to be aired out.
We drove over to our folks’ place, about 10 miles away, and spent the rest of the night there. Apart from the smell, the damages were confined to the blinds, a small section of carpet, and some sheetrock. Thank goodness for the smoke alarm - we’d have probably all suffocated before waking up. And the next day, BIL got an ash bucket.
When I was 12 or so, I went to bed one night with my older brother reading by the light of a candle propped up with a tennis shoe by his bed. I was on the top bunk and out younger brother was on the bottom.
I woke up some time later with a painfully dry throat. The light was really bright and I couldn’t look at it directly. After a glass of water, I went back into the room to find that the candle had burned down and the tennis shoe had caught on fire, which then had gone to the carpet and floor.
It was slowly burning about six inches from my brother’s bed, buy I woke up beef it got there.
We were able to put out the fire. My father overheard us and came to see what the excitement was about.
The next day was my grandfather’s funeral, and our Sunday clothes smelled like smoke, but it could have been a lot worse.
The link shows the biggest fire I’ve ever seen. The Durham Woods fire was spectacular and could be seen for many miles. It didn’t look real. A column of fire shooting into the night sky.
Worse than that was when my next door neighbor’s house burned down. I was about 6 and watched as my friend’s house was gutted killing his mother.
Oh and 911.
Probably the worst was while I was at summer camp. A neighboring cabin caught on fire in the middle of the night and they woke us all up to evacuate the village (the camp was organized by “villages” of around ten cabins with 8 campers and 1-2 counsellors). It was scary for pretty much all the reasons you would expect getting woken up in the middle of the night and getting marched passed a giant fireball where children sleep is scary.
Fortunately no one was hurt.
It also didn’t help that for the weeks leading up to this, the counselors kept fucking with us that WWIII had started and we would have to go all Red Dawn with them (it was the 80s).
Second would have to be when I was in Boy Scouts and a massive forest fire started a couple miles from us. Close enough that we could see it on the hillside, but far enough that I guess we didn’t need to be evacuated.
Not on the scale of some of the tragedies posted in the thread, but friends of ours just lost EVERYTHING a few days ago. Someone (not them) got stupid with a cigarette butt in a plastic flowerpot in their apartment building. 40 people now homeless as a result. Our friends got out with their pets and the clothes on their backs and nothing else. Their unit was not affected by the fire - but so much water got pumped into the building that the structure was damaged and it’s unsafe to go in and retrieve anything.
I saw a video of the fire on one of the news websites and it was pretty impressive :(.
When I was six or seven I was playing with a friend who lived 2 doors away. We heard sirens but didn’t really think much of it. Her dad came in and told me “those fire trucks are going to your house”. He was always such a joker (and kind of a weirdo) that he finally had to walk me outside to prove it. My mom had started a grease fire in the kitchen. No one was hurt and I guess there wasn’t much damage . Oddly, I can’t remember those details.
As and adult, the VW Beetle I was driving caught fire. Major thoroughfare during evening rush hour and not one person seemed to notice. I pulled onto a side street and knocked frantically on the first door I came to (this was before I had a cell phone). The lady was a bit of a bitch; just basically said she’d call the fire dept. and closed the door in my face. So I stood on the sidewalk and watch my beloved car burn:(
I was around 20 (circa. 1980). On a Christmas Eve, my best friend and I had gone out to the bars and then attended midnight mass. On the way home, fire trucks were passing us left and right. My friend says, “let’s go see what’s going on.” We followed the trucks to a huge apartment fire. We probably stayed there at least 3 hours. Finally, around 3AM they they brought the charred bodies of two victims. The first dead bodies, other than in a casket, I’d ever seen. Still can picture it today.
December 1992. my husband and I were almost the first people at a fire at the home of our good friends. Their 13 year old daughter was home and we weren’t able to find her to get her out. We kicked in a door and broke a picture window trying. She was found by the front door, which we had tried but failed to break down. It was the most horrific experience either of us has ever had. It still haunts us.
We think she set a pan with grease in it on the stove, turned the burner on and left the kitchen. Please make sure your children know that they should never do this. She was a great, sweet, responsible kid who made a mistake that ended her life.
Someone was burning stuff in their yard when it was windy, and the grass caught fire and it made it right next to my house, warping the siding. He got it stopped using his water hose and then they paid for it to be be fixed.
I was inside on the computer at the time, and didn’t know about it until they were already dealing with it. And I had no idea how close it had gotten or how bad it was until I saw the damage.
Also had a poorly grounded neighbor’s house across the street burn down. And these were actually our friends from even before they moved there. But I say my house actually almost catching fire was the worst for me personally. I at least saw that fire (while it was still contained.)
No, I’m not sure why we missed the other fire, other than it being across the street and at night. I was pretty young at the time.
July 18, 1976. I was almost five years old (close enough that the newspaper stories listed my age as 5). It was 2am, and my family was in our apartment asleep. My mother woke and smelled smoke, but before she could even get out of bed there was running in the hallway and banging on our door and shouts of “FIRE!!” Mom and Dad scooped up my 3-year-old brother and me and raced out of the building.
The guy in the apartment above ours had fallen asleep while smoking. The entire building was a loss. Our cat didn’t make it, but luckily we all got out safely (I went into shock and was taken by ambulance to the local hospital – I shared the back of the ambo with a firefighter who’d fallen through the roof when it collapsed – but I was fine by the time we arrived).
Just this morning I was organizing pictures of the newspaper clippings and photographing the teddy bear I got on-scene from the Red Cross, because the 40th anniversary is a month away and I plan to post about it on Facebook.
Did the smoker survive?
Yes. There were no fatalities.
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My mom and I almost died when I was a baby. Thank you, firefighters! (It’s a longer story, but I have to hunt and peck right now.)
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My mom and I are driving down 45 to go to UH classes. (Many decades later.) Her car breaks down. She gets it to the side of the road. (On of those underpasses near the Hunger Center.) We’re sitting there, trying to figure out what to do. I smell smoke. I stsrt yelling, “Get OUT OF THE FUCKING CAR, NOW!”
Then flames. I jump out and come around inro traffic making her get out of the car. Again, neither of us hurt. Got towed. Car totalled.
- Also, it’s not uncommon (it’s happened 3 times; I don’t vacation that much.) That I’ve been in hotels that were evacuated b/c of smoke alarms. None were real fires, jusr people smoking in places they shouldn’t.
I’m an eensy bit paranoid about fire stuff.
My and The Fella’s last trip, just recently, we were walking back from the light rail to the hotel and fire trucks passed us. I turned and said, “If those are for our hotel, I’m never going on a trip agsin. I’m going to start getting profiled.”
It wasn’t!
I used to look after my local fire brigade, so I heard some stories. One story was one of a guy who had been working on an ambulance. The ambulance had a canister of compressed or liquefied gas that was leaking. There was a spark and it exploded. Fortunately the man was unscathed - he was inside the explosion and everything exploded away from him. One day they were having trouble creating a report in WordPerfect and I was called in to help. The picture of the burned baby was not nice.
I drove past the Windsor Castle fire and on the way home there was a constant stream of appliances going the opposite way, towards Windsor.