Fire
On Thursday afternoon, our building caught on fire. I believe the source was in the basement of the hardware store that rents two storefronts worth of space on the ground floor of our co-op. My neighbors shared later as we were trying to piece together a timeline of events that they felt some rumbling. Maybe it was an explosion, but by 2:08 PM, as I was walking from the Lenox Avenue store back to the apartment, I saw black smoke pouring out of the storefront windows. I immediately took a picture and sent it to the building WhatsApp group that I organized a couple of years ago and told everyone they should get out STAT.
You couldn't make the timing of this incident up. Less than 24 hours earlier, one of our Scoopers texted to say that she wouldn't be able to make it to work the next day because her apartment caught on fire. Nick and I were on the phone with her minutes before I observed our building spewing smoke. The Scooper was saying, "And then they had to throw the baby out of the window," and I cut her off with, "Hold on... I'm sorry to stop you but I think my building is on fire." And then I hung up.
The 10 minutes that followed included me rushing to get the kids out of the house. I tried to find the cat, but she hid with all of the panicked energy in the air. I told them to head to the store and then I, along with a woman who saw the smoke at the same time as me, ran to each floor pounding on each of my neighbors' doors to tell them to get out. While I was upstairs, the fire department pried open my door because no one answered. They couldn't get one of my floor neighbor's doors open so they broke all of his street-side windows to confirm that no one was inside. By this point, we stood outside watching four fire trucks and their firefighters ransack our building while they looked for the source of the fire to snuff it out.
We all evacuated safely and looked on at our pre-war building in shock, concern, panic, but with gratitude.
I have experienced several New York City disasters—my dorm was located in the Financial District during 9/11 and after I left for class that morning in a pair of black Old Navy flip-flops, jeans, and a hot pink ¾ thin hoodie from Express, I was displaced for weeks before being able to return home. During the Blackout of 2003, I walked from the Studio Museum in Harlem where I was interning for the summer all the way to the East Village where I miraculously ran into one of my friends after my phone died. She housed me that evening while the power was out because I lived in Sunset Park, Brooklyn at the time and really, really did not want to walk from Harlem to Sunset Park on that hot August day. When the transformer blew up at the 14th Street ConEd plant, I was trying to make it on time to my hostess shift at Hillstone in the Citigroup Center in Midtown. Then there was COVID.
But nothing beats a fire. I was not mentally prepared for the split-second decisions that needed to be made at that moment. I didn't grab my go-binder even though it sits in a tote in an accessible place. I haven't finished my go-bag of other provisions even though I couldn't stop talking about it at the beginning of this year following the Southern California wildfires. All I could do was grab my kids in their PJs and Crocs and help evacuate our building.
When I was telling my sister, who lives in California and knows many people who were impacted by the wildfires, about what happened, she said that you have to be physically prepared and your mindset has to be prepared, too. My mindset was nowhere near prepared, but here's what I've learned from this real-life fire drill:
My Fire Drill Lessons & Reminders
Grab your kids AND your documents
Make a video of your house/apartment and all your worldly belongings for insurance purposes. I happened to have just made ours the night before after hearing about our Scooper's house fire.
Make sure your home insurance policy is active
Always talk to your neighbors or make sure at least one person in your home does. We would not have been able to organize so quickly had we all been strangers to each other. If you've been here long enough, you know I don't believe in an individualist approach to life. We are always stronger together and Thursday's evacuation proved that.
So, here’s to community and insurance.
Still sitting in gratitude for the fact that we and our Scooper are all safe.
Petrushka
Your Local Ice Cream Lady & Life/Business Coach