Tuesday morning and it’s Day #4 of the stubborn high-rise fire in Calcutta. It started off with the head of the fire service proclaiming that the fire is “totally under control.” The trouble is, that’s the same thing they’ve said each morning for the past three days. And yet the flames are still flaming and the smoke is still smoking.
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AFP
Now if you were to say that the fire is under control because it’s not going anyplace but up in the same building, you would have a point. Factor in that there couldn’t be much left to burn after four days and I’ll go along with the assessment.
But I don’t know if I would trust them completely after this statement quoted in the Sify News:
“There is no possibility of the building, which had tilted to its left, collapsing,” West Bengal Fire Service principal officer Gopal Bhattacharya said.
No, no possibility at all. After a few years, they all start to lean, don’t they? A tv news crew on the scene is reporting that the fire is still “raging” on the top two floors and that chunks of the building are falling off. I’d be willing to bet that there are probably 5 or 10 thousand home video cameras trained on the building hoping to catch the moment when it all comes down. Then stand aside as they race to be the first to get their version posted on YouTube. I’ll be watching.
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Today is voting day in Michigan. Overall, it’s a meaningless ballot statewide because of the political parties’ internal squabbling. But one ballot measure that we’ll be watching is in Pontiac where the citizens will decide, for all intents and purposes, whether they will maintain a fully-staffed fire department or allow the politicians to decimate it in favor of propping up their favorite social welfare programs.
More precisely, the City Charter mandates 1 firefighter for each 2,000 residents in the city. If the voters approve the elimination of this clause, then the city will probably immediately eliminate the EMS division and turn all the ambulance service over to a private contractor. And it is my guess that within a year or so they will be fooling the citizens with 2-man engine companies. We’ll see.
All right, we’d better get this equipment checked out. I’ll go start the coffee.
