Ever cooked a marshmallow over an open flame, and had it get too hot, and catch fire?\u00a0 You know that look – the marshmallow wrapped in a smooth, all-consuming sheet of flame?<\/p>\n
That’s what my garage looked like when I woke up early Tuesday morning.<\/p>\n
I am a fairly heavy sleeper.\u00a0 I heard some sirens – and they didn’t go away.\u00a0 So I opened my eyes, and saw an orange-ish flickering on the leaves outside my windows, and distinctly thought “there’s at least a 50-50 chance this can’t be a good thing”.<\/p>\n
I jumped out of bed and looked out the back window, and saw my garage – already fully consumed in flames, looking like that marshmallow in the story above.\u00a0\u00a0I was too shocked to move for a second.\u00a0\u00a0 The wildest part?\u00a0 I felt the radiant heat from the blaze all the way up in my bedroom, 40-50 feet away.\u00a0 It was warm.<\/em><\/p>\n I ran downstairs to try to call 911 – but the phone was out; my phone, internet and cable lines run right in front of the garage. I was dashing to find my cell phone when I heard a banging on the door.\u00a0 My neighbor, occasional commenter PeterH, was pounding on the door; better yet, I saw firetrucks pulling up outside.\u00a0 The cavalry were already there.<\/p>\n Whatever else I can say about Saint Paul’s government, we’ve long had one of the best big-city fire departments in the business.\u00a0 It’s one of few parts of a Better Saint Paul I’ve always been happy to pay for.\u00a0 There are stories of guys doing hitches in the US Marines to get ready to take the SPFD entrance exams.\u00a0 Anyway, it took ’em maybe twenty minutes to knock down the flames.\u00a0 There wasn’t much they could do, but they did it well…<\/p>\n The garage was a total loss – nothing but flinders.\u00a0 And while I’ve heard what damage radiant heat can do, this was amazing; it wiped out my garden, killed a lilac bush, crisped leaves on my black walnut tree 25 feet away, scorched grass along the driveway at least that far, and burned an abutting fence in my neighbor’s yard.<\/p>\n I was lucky, of course, on many levels.\u00a0 Insurance should cover the replacement (knock wood).\u00a0 The garage was nearly empty – I’d actually carted off a bunch of storage last winter to make it, um, less of a fire hazard.\u00a0 And my car – which is usually in the driveway, five feet from the doors – was parked in front that night; I’d felt lazy, and parked on the street.\u00a0 Most importantly, nobody was hurt.<\/p>\n A million thanks to my neighbors, of course, a good half-dozen of whom called 911 before I woke up.<\/p>\n And so let me remind you – test your smoke detectors!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Ever cooked a marshmallow over an open flame, and had it get too hot, and catch fire?\u00a0 You know that look – the marshmallow wrapped in a smooth, all-consuming sheet of flame? That’s what my garage looked like when I woke up early Tuesday morning. I am a fairly heavy sleeper.\u00a0 I heard some sirens […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mitch"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5101\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}