Ever seen a fully involved structure fire? It's a pretty awesome sight, in the original sense of the word. Fire is almost a living thing. It breathes, and it feeds.
On my 19th birthday, my brother was getting high. I was back visiting my mother from college, and had been out late the night before celebrating (because the birthday starts at midnight of course).
I had a separate apartment in my house on the top floor, with my own private entrance etc... I had moved out a few years before, but because I was living in various tiny apartments between college and the Air Force, I still had a lot of my stuff up in that room. Thousands of books, my sword and knife collection, the wood furniture I made at my uncles furniture shop, my guitars...
A hell of a lot of my life was there; anything that I couldn't carry in the back of my car basically.
My mother also had $25,000 in cash in a wall safe up there, and another perhaps $20,000 worth of jewlery stock. She was a wholesale jewler, and that is very often a cash business.
That morning, my brother went up to my apartment with several of his friends to get high. I had slept downstairs because it was cooler there and we didnt have air conditioning. I woke up a few seconds before hearing someone scream "Oh Fuck... FIRE!!!".
My brother, or one of his high friends, I never got it straight which, had dropped an ash into my sofa, which lit a cushion on fire. Being high, they didnt respond appropriately and the whole couch was ablaze before they ran downstairs.
The couch caught the roof on fire, and eventually burned the top two floors of the house down, including the money, the jewlery, and all my posessions. Everything in the rest of the house was severly damaged from water and smoke.
Everything I had in my life was in that house; everything my mother had.
While I watched it burn, I beat my brother nearly to death. He destroyed our lives, not for the first or the last time, because he wanted to get high.
He still won't take responsibility to this day.
My neighbors house is on fire. Actually several of them in a row. There is a fully involved multi-unit structure fire in the apartment complex the next street over from me. I saw the fire start while I was out walking the dog (I like to do it late at night because it's cooler, and I can't sleep anyway).
My neighborhood is mostly nice, older residential homes, but the church a block over has a row of what could best be referred to as charity apartments. Mostly they are occupied by young legal mexican immigrant familes, that make up most of the catholic population down here.
These are mostly good hardworking people, but some of them; mostly the brothers, cousins, and "friends" of the families who the church rents to; well to be charitable, they are in these homes because it's easier than working hard.
In this case, one of these trash decided to fight his friend with fireworks. In Arizona, in a stick built 40 year old apartment. In the middle of a drought.
I saw the last of the fireworks going off, and the assholes running away as the apartment blazed up; but I didn't bother trying to stop them. I was calling 911 when the first siren came near so I hung up. I told the cops that arrived what I saw, and they were questioning the apparent residents who were outside staring while their lives burned.
What's worse, is that this is one long continuous single story row of cheap stick built apartments. Most construction of that type around here is cinder block (both for cost and fire danger) but these places are so old they come before that code. They are also so old, and so dried out and covered with oil paint, that they are like matchwood. You couldnt have seen a place burn faster if it was covered with gasoline.
Within seconds, the column of smoke was thick and alternating black and white from wood and plastic and tarpaper and tar and all of those things that make up a house, and a home. The smell is choking, but under it is that familiar pleasant odor of dry wood burning.
By the time the first pumper arrived; not more than 3 minutes from the start of the fire (we are 1/2 mile from a fire station); the two units on either side of the origination point were also fully involved. and the fire was spreading further. The smoke is filling my entire neighborhood; I can even smell it inside my house right now. I dont see how they're going to be able to stop the whole row from going up.
10 families lives are going to be destroyed, because some drunk or high (I couldnt tell which, maybe both) piece of trash decided to play with fire.
Makes we wish I'd shot the bastards.
