We had some excitement yesterday evening. There was a fire in a house across the street from ours. I had walked over to the Little Man’s school to pick him up. We were walking home, and saw black smoke coming from the vicinity of our development. At first, I thought it was smoke from a truck passing by, but I quickly traced it to a fireplace in a house across the street from ours. The fireplace was billowing black smoke, but it also seemed like the smoke was coming out of the sides of the fireplace. We then heard sirens.

As we walked past, we could see flames in the main floor of the townhouse. It was actually kind of scary. By then the fire trucks were arriving. I think I saw a total of 9 fire vehicles. I heard (unconfirmed) that they got one older man out of the house. He was, apparently, the only one there. I snapped this picture from the front of my house looking down my street in the direction of the fire (you can’t quite see the house that caught fire in this picture):

It was several hours before the trucks cleared out. The smell of smoke was heavy in the air and the clothes we were wearing had to be tossed into the wash. This morning, things seemed back to normal and the smell of smoke was mostly gone. I checked the local town paper but so far, I’ve seen no report on the fire so I don’t know anything more about it other than what I heard from folks yesterday. If they post I story, I’ll put up a link.