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(Firetruck outside our front door last night)

Around 12:30am-1am today, the fire alarms went off. I dutifully woke up Kat (who claims to be a light sleeper but now I know she's lying), got dressed enough to go outside, grabbed ID, keys, phone, and cats, and headed down the stairs.

The stairs reeked of ozone and burning plastic the lower we went, and I was a little concerned that the fire would be coming up. We'd have to hop the roof to the neighboring building, which would be trivial from our lower deck, as the building next door tops off at exactly the same level.

We stood outside (in the rain, of course) for half an hour or so, and then the fire department, without actually going inside to inspect for any damage, disabled the alarm "for the night" and let us back in.

I had a suspicion, based on the smell, that it was the elevator motor, primarily because I didn't want it to be something that would actually involve fire, like a gas leak or burning plastic in someone's vacant apartment.

I stayed up for a few more hours, and at 4am, walked near the front door, where the smell was atrocious. I went into the hall and smelled the elevator shaft, and was almost knocked over. Another call to the FD was made, and the firepeople actually bothered to come into the building and investigate the cause of the smell. They identified it, disabled the power, and set up big fans to air out the stairwell, dispelling the bad smell to the roof.

Unfortunately, our bedroom juts out on the roof, and the door to the top deck is right next to the stairwell door through which the stink was being blown. As a result, the top two floors of our place were uninhabitable until about 4pm today, as we fought the battle using Febreeze, strategically placed fans and HEPA filters, and open windows and doors. We ended up sleeping on the couch for the night, which was...less than comfortable.

Anyway, we're not dead, but I have no faith that the SFFD would have prevented us from being dead if there had been an actual fire. It did give us a safe opportunity to plan for fire-related contingencies, such as surprising our neighbors on the building next door with a knock on their door at any time of night by two neighbors carrying a run kit and two cats.

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