Tonight the house across the street from us caught fire (thankfully no one was hurt). But we were out front right from when the first fire truck rolled up and we were able to watch the firefighters gear up and enter the house.

And you know what? It was pretty unnerving. I’ve always been a touch of a pyro. I used to make hair-spray torches when I was in grade school, and I graduated to home made film canister “fireworks” in high school - I’ve always liked fire. I always thought that it would be no big deal to enter a buring building and put out a fire.

That is, until I actually saw a house fire close up. When the trucks pulled up, there was a little black “soot” around the top of the garage door. In the five minutes it took the fire fighters to put on their gear and start their entry, the smoke was just rolling out of the garage and from the eaves of the house! By the time they actually started ripping the garage door down the smoke was just boiling out of the garage. All of the fire fighters were running full oxygen systems just so they could breath in the house. As they came through the garage, you could just barely see their flash lights through the smoke.

It was not something I think I could just go “do” (like I previously thought I could). My hat is off to the people who do this every day. It’s probably something that you would eventually get used to, but seeing it, literally in my front yard, made me realize just how dangerous fires really are.