2020, the year we can’t wait to say goodbye to…..
We stayed up fairly late last night; it’s 2020, so a couple of Die Hard movies seemed appropriate. Two probably wasn’t the right choice, we ended up crawling into bed around 1:30am.
Watching Die Hard now seems like a little bit of foreshadowing…
Not too terribly much later, sometime around 2:45am I woke up. In and of itself that’s not unusual. I typically wake up somewhere around 2:30 or 3am for no apparent reason. But as I lay there trying to go back to sleep there was a loud bang outside.
I said “Did you hear that?” to Kirk…but he was still sleeping. The bedroom sliding door was open a few inches for the cool air, and a few moments later there was a WHOOSH sound. This time Kirk was awake, my earlier question probably roused him.
“That was a weird sound.”
We lay there for a few more moments and then my next questions was “Do you smell that?”
There was a sulfur-like smell, definitely smoke. My initial thought was that someone had set off some fireworks outside on the street. I stood up to go take a look from the breezeway but, as I passed the open window, I could hear flames.
Fire has a sound, even without the crackling of wood.
I grabbed my housecoat and went out onto the breezeway above our living room and all I could see was a wall of fire on the other side of the trees that screen us from the street. At first I couldn’t decide if the flames were the townhouse or something else. Another explosion pretty much identified it as a car and I went running for the phone to call 911.
We went out to the end of the driveway and, a few minutes and a few small explosions later, a firetruck arrived and two police cars blocked the street in either direction.
This is what woke us up at that ungodly hour…a car explosion directly across the street…..
This is not what you expect to see across the street in the wee hours of Christmas morning.
What surprised us even more than the fires, was that several explosions didn’t wake up the neighbourhood and it wasn’t until the firetruck arrived the lights from both it and the two police cars were lighting everything up, and the fire was pretty much out, that we saw a neighbour; a woman from the first unit in the complex came over to stand with us for a few minutes. She noted that the firefighters were particularly interested in the trunk. I have no idea what could have set it off like that, or what might have been smouldering away in the trunk on a cold’ish winter night.
The police came over to ask if we’d seen the car parked there earlier in the day; I replied that I hadn’t left the house all day and that we can’t see across the street because of the fence and the trees…..but that, if that smoking lump of melted rubber and twisted metal was a BMW, than the owner of the unit it was parked in front of owned a black BMW so if could be his….
I guess it was, because the police went over and rang the doorbell and eventually the lights came on and the owner came out to find his car not exactly as he’d left it.
The car was parked right in front of the owner’s townhouse…there were multiple explosions, sirens, banging and other noises as they pried the melted doors off to try to get inside to both put out the fire and try to get the VIN number of the car….there are some heavy sleepers around here it would seem…..
And the stink! Burning rubber…our bedroom stank for hours, making it even harder to get back to sleep.
This morning, Kirk looked through our camera footage for the night to see if he could see anything unusual. We can’t see where the car was parked, because of trees and the fence, but at 2:45am there is an explosion that lit everything up… and nothing before that, so obviously that first explosion is what woke me up.
The one saving grace is that the car was parked on the street and not in his underground parking garage, which is private and sits right next to a door that leads directly into the suite. I would imagine that the first explosion might have blown the door in and set the building on fire.
Kirk and I are running on just a couple of hours sleep and I see couch napping as the afternoon pastime….
2020, never a dull moment….the year that just keeps giving.
5 comments