Silly Fire Department!

Okay, so that's not really my apartment burning down, but it does set the stage for this crazy story! It's been a few months now and most of you have heard the drama, but I figured I'd make it official history by putting it online!

One night in April I was sleeping soundly in my bed after a difficult day, minding my own business, when . . . duhn duhn duhn . . . I woke up to nearly suffocating gas fumes. I just happened to wake up around 12:30 and realized something was wrong. I wasn't sure if it was natural gas I was smelling or something else, but I could barely breathe. I walked around my apartment trying to get a sense of what might be wrong. I looked out my windows, everything seemed normal, then I looked through the peephole in my front door. (This still makes me uneasy writing about it months later!) The peephole had been COVERED. As in, I couldn't see anything. At that point I kinda freaked out and knew that something really was wrong. I was terrified to open the door, though, since I had no idea what might be going on outside. I called my friend Jenny, who convinced me to call the fire department. When they showed up I felt okay opening the door and things were more or less normal outside.

The fire dept looked around and agreed that they could smell gas (gasoline) but couldn't locate a source for it and the guy who was in charge brushed it off as paint fumes that had drifted over from somewhere else. And the covered peephole? All 4 of the doors on my floor had masking tape over them, which the fire dept said was because the apt complex had probably just painted (I know, I know, there was definitely no logic in that argument). Another neighbor came out while this was going on and we noticed that the opening to the crawlspace in our attic (which is in the stairway landing, I'm on the top/3rd floor) wasn't completely closed. We pointed that out to the fire dept but again they brushed it off. They told us to air out our apartments and that we should be fine.

The fumes were so strong, especially in my apartment, that I refused to sleep there, even if there had been a chance that I could have fallen back asleep. I spent the rest of the night at Jenny's and went to work the next morning. I texted my friend Summer, who also lives in my complex, from school and asked if she'd had any problems with fumes the night before and told her my story. She immediately called me and told me that her neighbor had seen my building on fire that morning and had called 911.

Are you feeling the drama yet?

So I farm out the classes that are supposed to come to me for music and rush home. The fire dept was just finishing up. Turns out it was the apartment directly across from me (our doorways are about 8 feet apart) that had burned. The fire had started in his closet. Luckily it was reported early and they were able to stop it before it spread beyond that unit. As I'm talking to the firefighters I point out that I can still smell gasoline strongly in my apartment and ask if I should be worried. They start to do some investigating after I pointed out the covered peepholes and crawlspace opening (come on people!). At that point I also realize there is a huge stain in my ceiling, about 2 square feet.

They needed a hydrocarbon detector to confirm what Jenny and I had already figured out. Someone had come up, covered the peepholes, used a ladder to get into the crawlspace, and doused the attic with gasoline. Lucky me, the most concentrated part of it was right above my door. We don't know when exactly the fire started, but it is a miracle it was stopped that soon. Otherwise it would have spread to the attic and that would have been a disaster. It would have spread to my apt and my doorway would have collapsed, and if I had still been in bed . . . I still shudder about how bad it could have been!

There are more scary details about who we think started the fire, but suffice it to say that I am one lucky girl! I was definitely being watched over. It was most likely some wacko who could have shown up anywhere, but I was pretty unnerved by the whole thing and didn't sleep in my apartment after that. I stayed with Jenny for about a week and a half . . . and then I broke my foot . . .