Some excitement at work today…

I’m a service operations center engineer, and I work odd hours – Sunday through Tuesday and every other Wednesday, 12-hour shifts.  Normally, Sundays are very slow and frequently boring, but today the fire alarm went off and my co-worker and I went packing outside.  We knew right away it was no drill, as we hadn’t been alerted to one (they always notify us if they’re testing), and we could smell awful acrid smoke in the elevator lobby.  Taking the stairs down and out of the building, we found black, sooty smoke pouring out from the parking garage down the block, which extends under our building, hence the source of the smell.

Turns out there was a car fire in the garage!  I went down later after the fire was put out to check it out (wish I’d had my camera with me, sorry).  The car was incinerated, inside and out.  It sat on flat, melted tires that looked molded to the concrete floor, and the entire car was a dusty gray with broken windows and a thoroughly blackened interior.  This was no simple hood fire – the car was a total loss.

No one appeared to be hurt, which is good.  The driver was apparently inside at the time the fire broke out.  That doesn’t surprise me, because the car wasn’t parked – it was skewed out in the parking lot lane as if it were being driven at the time and abandoned in a panic.  I wonder what happened to start the fire?

I’ll bring my camera to work tomorrow on the off-chance they haven’t moved it yet (it’s a holiday, so they’re probably not expecting a lot of traffic in the garage tomorrow).  Here’s the KOMO 4 news story on the fire, and the photo credit goes to them as well.