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[Lunar]

Interesting walk home today from work...  (downtown Manhattan).  Saw multiple people on stretchers, yet I saw an AP story saying there were no injuries?   Those people looked injured, and there were over a dozen ambulances.  

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/08/houston-street-fire-massi_n_640068.html






If you count ambiguous helicopters and news vans, pretty sure there may have been around 100 emergency vehicles without much exaggeration

[Lunar]

Interesting walk home today from work...  (downtown Manhattan).  Saw multiple people on stretchers, yet I saw an AP story saying there were no injuries?   Those people looked injured, and there were over a dozen ambulances.  

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/08/houston-street-fire-massi_n_640068.html



If you count ambiguous helicopters and news vans, pretty sure there may have been around 100 emergency vehicles without much exaggeration

As a side-note, despite living on the top floor of a six-story walk-up [making escape very difficult should a fire occur], I'm much less worried about fires here in NYC than my old haunting grounds in California.  Not much danger of a fire sweeping 500,000 acres here, or -- because my parents' house in California was on a steep hill -- the firefighters deciding to let your house burn because there's a more convenient defensive line that can be drawn uphill from your house.

[Lunar]

Your parents live in one of the worst places on earth for forest fires, Lunar.. on a hill, in the forest, in a climate that gets a sh**t ton of rain all winter and then doesn't see any for 3-4 months during the hottest time of year.  sh**t burns.

Well, it's where I grew up.  I like the wet winters [beats the hell out of humid summers], but yeah, we live in a timber box.  Fire marshals regularly show up to tell us to clean the pine needles out of our gutters or to store our wood farther away from the house

Fires are pretty much the only natural disaster I've been raised to remotely car about.

[Lunar]

Do you guys heat with wood or is it just for campfires/the occasional fire in the fireplace?

Wood is cheaper than heating through the electric company.

Spent a couple hundred hours of my life stacking wood logs to be burned, I have.

My Dad has been, and always will be, deafly unaware of the concept that time = money, and hiring experts can be cheaper than doing things yourself.