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Inferno
By adamg on Fri, 07/26/2013 - 9:40am
Amy Magiera took this photo of the Calvin Street fire in Somerville yesterday:
I took the photo around 6am on Caldwell Ave. The first fire truck arrived on the street just a few moments later. With what I saw yesterday morning, I still can't believe what an amazing job the responding firefighters did stopping this fire.
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Comments
holy cow!
holy cow!
yeah, firefighters are generally amazing
while others are running away from this they run in. Given the density of homes in Somerville I think we're very fortunate that this didn't become another Chelsea fire.
why americans build wooden houses?
Termite attacks, fires, wind vulnerability, water damage, noise penetration, sagging floors....all can be solved by building out of concrete as in the rest of the world. Why not here in the USA?
Kind regards.
one word: cost.
Wood houses are cheap, especially when you have a ready supply of cheap timber.
Learn some local history
First of all, Boston isn't necessarily like the rest of America. Go to NYC and Chicago and you will see many different building strategies and different codes for different areas.
Boston went through a big expansion at a time when lumber from Canada and Maine was dirt cheap. Combined with that, advances in firefighting around the same time meant that cities didn't blow up from a single fire. Put the two together and you get a whole lot of cheap, packed in tenement housing, often of balloon construction (until there wasn't enough big timber to do cellar-to-roof vertical beams any more).
Other cities didn't do things like this - Chicago, reeling from its megafire, required stone/masonry construction. The houses are much the same otherwise as in Boston, though - close together, same apartment layouts, two-flats and three-flats. Many US cities built on somewhat larger lots. Again, history of expansion and transportation and firefighting have a lot to do with how it all works out.
so amazing they're 4 blocks away and let it get to 7 alarms
Someone please explain to me how this fire, which was 4 blocks away from a huge fire station in Inman Square, managed to get so bad?
Seriously, why are our "firefighters" so incompetent at actually controlling structural fires? It seems that they're still doing the same thing they did 100 years ago - "shoot lots of water at it." And it's working about as well as it did 100 years ago: barely.
In Europe, fire departments now use small SUVs with foam/chemical suppressant tanks with high-pressure, lightweight, thin lines that can immediately be brought into the building to the source of the fire by one man.
Funny how that kitchen fire doesn't destroy an entire building (or neighborhood...) if you knock it down right away, instead of spending ten minutes setting up all sorts of needlessly complex plumbing.
Are you serious?
Somerville has some of the fastest response times of nearly any FD in the country.
They didn't let it get bad - IT WAS BAD.
They can't respond to a fire until they either see it or get a call! Given the hour of the morning, it was bad before people noticed it.
The fire was OUTSIDE the building - but the buildings are packed in, covered in wood and tar paper, and balloon construction - did you read the former resident's comment? Furthermore, most euro buildings ARE NOT MADE OF WOOD.
Please don't tell me you are in any way involved with firefighting - you don't have the first clue!
Two houses had already been mostly demolished
when I stopped by this area a couple of hours ago.