Sunday stories - Live

Story live from the North side.  I don't usually do 3 blog posts in a day, but this is an exception.

Just now, I was in the kitchen about to do the washing up and smelt what appeared to be burning toast or waffles.  The smell was getting more pronounced and then an alarm went off, from nearby, downstairs perhaps.  My wife and I rushed down and were looking for the unit the alarm was coming from.  It ended up being the one directly underneath ours, smoke coming through the kitchen and bathroom windows, more pronounced from the kitchen.  My son's friend came down to and noticed a women asleep on the lounge in the unit.  There were other neighbour's gathering around as well.  The gay neighbour from the other downstairs unit and I were trying to wake the women on the lounge.  I started yelling "Wake up, Wake up".  To no avail.  She wasn't stirring a bit.  I then yelled at the top of my lungs "fire, fire!" also to no avail.  I said to the neighbour, "do you think she might have taken something", to which he nodded.

My son's friend thought of a brilliant idea to try to turn the stove off, using a long pole outside the flat.  He grabbed it and was poking through the window to the stove and managed to turn it off.  The smoke was very thick, what seemed the whole flat but much worse in the kitchen area.  As were coming around the back, he noticed the barred window, the barring was loose and managed to pry it open.  He said "Who wants to go in" and I said, "You go in and open the door and wake her up".  He jumped in, nothing like youth on your team in an emergency.  I went around to the front door and there was heaps of smoke coming out of the unit and the door was open, other neighbours were already in there to, my sons friend was trying to get her awake, by shaking her.  He came back out the front and said that she wasn't really waking up, he shook her and she just didn't appear with it.

One of the other neighbours a lady from next door managed to get her off the couch and was walking her out of the smokey unit.  They walked past me and she appeared to be very sleepy and unaware of what was happening, they went out the front of the units.  There were a lot of helpful and curious neighbours around now including the couple who live next to us on the 2nd floor and neighbours i have hardly ever seen from the unit next door.

The fire truck turned up and a tall fireman walked up casually and asked which unit and I pointed him to the ground floor unit and said "the kitchen is around to the left".  The other fireman was out the front with the girl who fell asleep on the couch with the oven on, smoke everywhere, the alarm going off, neighbours yelling at her.  She had an oxygen mask on and appeared to be recovering on the ground.

My wife and I said "Good work to my son's friend" as my son finally prised himself away from his Xbox and came down to see what all the fuss was about.  My wife said that this neighbour would have been told by the real estate that she was being too noisy and given a warning and the landlord might have told her she has to move out. We always hear her in the early hours of the morning and into the night, she has a loud Canadian accent.  We all went back up to our unit as the fuss was dying down.  A little later the police turned up as well, most likely to question the neighbour.  I couldn't remember what i was doing before all the action.. oh yeh, the washing up.   Forget that!  Let's go get a coffee instead.