My choice: retreat into a smoke-filled elevator or chance the unknown
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Version 0 of 1. There is a lot of siren noise in New York City. It howls through the canyons between skyscrapers to shake the windows and shatter the nerves. I am always complaining about it: my neighbourhood, a collection of residential and office blocks, has a fire house at its centre and every night we are woken by another emergency. More than once I have speculated that the fire crews put on their sirens at 3am not because they need to, but because it is fun. I will not be making that observation again after this morning, when as usual I took the elevator down 13 floors to the lobby. Around the seventh floor, smoke started to pour in. When the doors opened on the ground floor, it was to one of those scenes you think you will never see: a wall of smoke so thick you couldn’t find your hand in front of your face. The air smelled of burning plastic. My two babies burst into tears and started violently coughing. Panic, like all forms of shock, is unpredictable I didn’t know what to do. To push them forward, into the smoke, not knowing where the fire was and with zero visibility, seemed idiotic. But to get back in a smoke-filled elevator and go up a building that was on fire seemed equally horrendous. This will sound absurd, but I thought in that instant of Mary Macgregor, the hopeless girl in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, who “ran hither and thither in the hotel fire” until she died. I backed into the elevator, hit the button and then called 911. It takes roughly 14 seconds to get to the floor where I live and no journey has ever felt longer. Once in the apartment, and with the emergency operator still on the line, I put wet towels down by the door and stood by the window to watch as the fire trucks and ambulances began to arrive. “You’re doing great ma’am,” said the operator, causing me briefly to lose it. (I got it back by filling the bathroom sink with water, a useless but consoling gesture). The babies had soot around their noses but seemed otherwise fine. Related: British Airways plane catches fire at Las Vegas airport #BA2276 You go through life wondering idly how you’ll fare in this type of scenario; whether the decisions you make in the moment will decide your fate. After 9/11, the wisdom of staying put rather than getting out of a burning building was undermined, but emergency operators will still advise you that, as long as the fire isn’t in your apartment, it is safer to stay inside with the door shut than to go out into a smoke-filled corridor. Everyone in this case was lucky, as they were in the plane that caught fire on the runway in Las Vegas this week. By the time a firefighter knocked on my door, sweat pouring down his face after climbing 13 flights, the fire had been put out. He looked tired, and wired, a celestial being with his hat slightly askew. How do you panic? Passengers on this week’s Vegas flight were slammed for pulling their hand baggage from the overhead bins as they left but that’s unfair. Panic, like all forms of shock, is unpredictable. People laugh when given terrible news, or pause to lock the door while fleeing a fire. The mind freezes and the body ploughs on regardless. No news is good news In the afternoon I went downstairs to look at the damage. A crew from a company specialising in “residential disaster restoration services” had set up industrial fans and was mopping up the mess. The fire had been in the laundry room, which means if we had headed for the fire exit, we would have walked towards rather than away from it, a thought that reignited my panic. Then I ran into some neighbours discussing whether or not we’d made the morning news and suddenly it was over. I went back upstairs. All afternoon I have been listening to the sirens of the city, the sweetest sound I have ever heard. @emmabrockes |