Friday, September 14, 2007

The fire scare

It's been three months since we moved into the apartment. After about 2 dozen false fire alarms during those months, today we finally got the real fire scare.
This afternoon the fire alarm kept going off. We tried to ignore it, as proper ignorant citizens should do, but when we actually smelled smoke enter our apartment through the ventilation system, we thought it best to head down the fire escape.


And it proved a sound decision. On the way down, there was smoke building up on the 8th floor. In only a few minutes the Fire Department (or, as they call themselves, Civil Defense) and Police were on location and proceeded to fight the fire.
It turned out to be an 'ordinary' kitchen fire, and they managed to extinguish the fire quite quickly. But it did alert us to what could happen so easily!
Fortunately no one got hurt, and our apartment is fine. We could return to it after an hour and a half.

Interesting thing... even as we already were standing outside for half an hour, people sporadically still were coming out of the building. People who earlier obviously had ignored or not heard the fire alarm...

Yes, time to get our home insurance set up!

1 comment:

FreeTinkerer said...

I guess .... residences in UAE do not have fire places?

Ha Ha - of course, I'm only kidding!