“Hey, I dont know if you like fire, but there’s a big one across the street.”
My neighbor has just knocked on my door. I just got home from a long day at work. I had awakened at four AM in Mew Mexico, hopped on a plane to LAX and driven straight to Amoeba where I ran around for nine hours in service of hundreds of last-minute shoppers. A hard day. A tough job.
But as I step outside to the chaos and craziness of Martel Avenue I realize that there are some people who have far tougher jobs than I do:
Firefighters arrived quickly to reports of a structure fire with a person trapped to discover flames extending from the front portion of a subdivided single family home threatening a three-story apartment building to the south.
According to witnesses, an 18 year-old male had been seated in the living room of the one-story duplex, when he noticed a nearby artificial Christmas Tree catch fire. At first attempting to unplug the tree, he was driven back by intense heat and flames, and subsequently proved unable to find or muster a fire extinguisher within the home.
His 61 year-old father departed his spouse in a rear bedroom in an attempt to assist his son, before both men were pushed from the house by searing heat and ink-dark smoke that rose from floor-to-ceiling, making their rescue of the man’s 56 year-old wife impossible.
Read the full account at the LAFD blog here.
See a few more photos (taken by my ailing digital camera) here.
