Fire!
[Photos taken on 05-06 April 2018, posted on 24 October 2018. Spent over an hour out in the freezing cold wind to support the women’s strike downtown today.]
As I was driving to work after the gym on a cloudless gorgeous April morning, a gray smoke cloud over by where I work caught my attention. On closer inspection the house multipurpose commercial/industrial building next door to my workplace was engulfed in flames! (28 images total)
(It turned out later that the center area of the building, aka where the fire started from an electrical fault, didn’t have water sprinklers, as it had started out being the LazyTown filming studio (and thus mostly empty) before Icewear came along and filled it with flammable clothing. Nobody seemed to realized the fire prevention system was not up to the task…)
Thursday 05 April 2018
A very scary smoke cloud.
Uh, oh… on the turnoff to my workplace (Wait for the animated gif to load)
The view from where I parked.
The view on the other side of the building.
I moved a bit closer. It would later transpire that the fire started in the middle of the building, where a clothing company stored its stock, and spread to the front of the building which was a storage facility. A lot of families and companies lost their stuff that day. Towards the back of the house things didn’t burn so badly, only melted, but some colleagues of mine barely got out before everything filled up with smoke.
My company had offices in the building that burned. Our newly office-less colleagues gathered in the cafeteria, while everyone got their bearings.
The view from my office window. We didn’t get much done that morning.
Apt.
Flames kept bursting out of the house.
As it happened, that day had long since been designated as “Marel-day”, with afternoon-talks spread all over our building. Our event planners managed in record time to relocate the event to Harpa, which happened to be empty that day. The only “hiccups” were a slightly later start time, and that the hamburgers that the hamburger-truck had started grilling that morning were given to the fire department workers, so they had to start cooking from scratch which resulted in a rather long hamburger-line. It was a gorgeous day though, so it was fine.
The view inside.
The hamburger line, and a few sunbathers.
The tagline for the event was We are we. Yeah… not the greatest, but there was as strong feeling of coming together after the events of that morning.
This image was probably my greatest take-away from the talks I attended. Basically, the most precious thing we have is out attention, and the things we give our attention to blossom and bloom. (So yes, put away your phone, and talk to your kid etc…)
This was also a good reminder.
Walking between auditoriums, we stopped for a bit to enjoy the view.
Looking inland.
Mild insanity taking over at 17:20 after a bizarre day.
Screenshot of a live video from the fire.
End-of-the-Event food. Much appreciated.
At 7 pm I drove a colleague back to work so he could bike home. This was the status of the fire then.
The Do Not Cross line was finally up.
This very cool machine had been brought in to rip the house apart so that the fire department could put the fire out. It kept tearing the house down for a few days afterwards. The driver seemed to know what he was doing!
Friday 06 April 2018
We got the day after the fire off from work, since the status of the air conditioning system was unknown, and all the filters needed to be replaced. I found myself out and about playing Pokemon.
I stopped by work just to check how things were going with the fire.
The cool machine was still working on tearing the house to pieces, and occasionally smoke would start billowing as a fire-nest got exposed to oxygen.
The middle area had almost been completely cleared out.
I’m guessing this means I tried to tidy up the garage. We are not tidy people. Sigh.
