Where there's smoke, there's fire (literaly)

From the point of view of both my work and my thesis, today has been a uneventfully successful day. I had a video-conference in the morning and then successfully tracked down some inconsistencies in our software which are now almost resolved. Then I watched a number of videos from the course (I covered the first "week" in just two days) and even made my first attempts at programming in GNU Octave, which will be used for exercises in the rest of the course.

The surprising moment of the day was seeing the firefighters in action at the parking lot of the supermarket in the late afternoon.

Photo by Spangdahlem Air Base

I went to do the shopping as usual, worked slowly through my list and even called Karen to check on a special offer of pork tenderloins. Two or three times over my stay in the supermarket I heard over PA "The owner of the vehicle with registration plate [number here], please come to your car immediately", but it was not my plate number so I thought it was probably just a fender bender. Then, as I was leaving the line of cash register an employee came through the door asking for the fire extinguisher, so I rushed out to check what exactly was happening and if my car was in kind of danger.

Smoke was billowing from the front side of an old Ford station wagon which was parked three spaces away from mine. I did not see any open flames and the smoke seemed to be limited to the front part, so I decided to push my shopping cart around and get to my car. Loading my groceries in direct line of sight of the fire did not seem wise, in case things got out of control, so I moved to the "safe" side of my car and started transferring the shopping to a crate, so that I could load it in my car in a few seconds.

By the time I was done with the packing a fire truck had arrived a two firemen were working on cooling the hood first, then opening it (some flames appeared for the first time) and quickly extinguishing everything with a lot of water. I was frozen in the spot watching them work, and a third fireman asked me to keep my distance to stay away from possible toxic fumes.

In the end, the whole affair was possible less than five minutes, but it was quite intense and had me shaken for a short while. When I drove back home and told Karen about the events she said "Oh, so that is why the fire truck drove by with the sirens blaring!!!".

Now it is time to quite down and get ready for the weekly video-conference with my mother and brothers, but I will tell you about it tomorrow. Cheers!