Car Fire: Highland Ave @ Conwell St.

[haptotrope.livejournal.com]

Fire: or rather cars on fire and exploding under the lofted concrete apartment building (270 Highland Ave). About 6 firetrucks, and all manners of Somerville/Medford Responding.

Woke up at a little before 2am to smashing of windows and general mayhem, and looked out the window and saw flames reflected in the house across the street. Heard more explosions, and called 911, ran outside, and saw the cars on fire in the parking lot under the building overhang. Still more explosions as the firefighters worked to put out the fires. It looked as if some part of the building lobby may have caught fire, or it could have just been flaming debris obscured by smoke.

There were reports of someone fleeing the scene, running down Highland towards Porter St., but other observers, noted he was just watching the fire, and bolted when the car started exploding.

The fire has been put out and people are loitering around in their pajamas... Nobody seemed to be hurt - The Cataldo Ambulance crew and gurney were unused at present observation. News cameras are present -- so we'll probably see this with more details on the TV tomorrow.

Comments

[m00n.livejournal.com]

Wow. That *sounds* like arson...

Also, isn't that directly across the street from a fire station?

[haptotrope.livejournal.com]

It does (tho we'll let the police sort that out)... and it is... if it hadn't been, its more likely that more cars and the building could have caught fire/collapsed.

[etana.livejournal.com]

I was wondering - I stayed inside because we had no idea what was going on - but I definitely called 911. It sounded like gunfire. I came out this morning and it looked like nothing happened. That was quick!
And smelly!
Man was it smelly@

[irinarasp.livejournal.com]

If you look at the part of the building that overhangs the parking lot, you can see the damage.

[two-stabs.livejournal.com]

Anarchists in Davis!

Is this the building that looks like is resting on

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

those really tiny pillars? Haven't walked there in a while...

Re: Is this the building that looks like is resting on

[ron_newman]

Yep, here's a Google street view.

[blondeamazon.livejournal.com]

Did you know that emergency vehicles were there before you called 911? If so, why call? Sorry, just a pet peeve of mine. I had a friend who worked for 911 in NH, and she told me how much time is wasted, and thus taking operators away from other emergency calls, but people calling in emergencies already responded to.

[leko.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was wondering about this myself.

[haptotrope.livejournal.com]

I didn't see the vehicles -- they hadn't appeared in full force... But I didn't waste their time. She knew my address, said they were on it, I thanked her, and hung up. And they were there by the time I made it to the curb.

[ron_newman]

I'm surprised there's nothing on either newspaper's web site or blog. Maybe all the reporters went to bed after finishing the election coverage.

[irinarasp.livejournal.com]

One of my coworkers said he heard about it on the news, but I couldn't find anything about it.

Or after waiting for the attacker

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

near the Sacramento underpass.

[haptotrope.livejournal.com]

Maybe YOU have to blog about it on Universal Hub, THEN the news will pick it up.

online vvideo

[emmabebi.livejournal.com]

does anyone have any video footage of this?

Would be appreciated!

[cranbonite.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of surprised I can't find anything in the news yet.

It was really terrifying to run out of my home through acrid smoke that burned my throat with my traumatized cats in tow. Thank god I have two carriers though. I talked to my neighbor whose husband dragged her out without the cat - I'm so glad when we got back the smoke hadn't gone all the way into the apartments; presumably their cat's okay. (One guy was holding his, no carrier.)

It sucked. I still haven't left the building again to see the damage (we re-entered from the back).

[omnia-mutantur.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to say yay for cat-evacuation. Go you!

[vonelftinhaus.livejournal.com]

saw it as it was happening, was bikin up highland from work around 1:40-the fire truck from engine 7 had pulled out of the fire house up the hill.Other trucks eventually showed up. The tires started to blow up from the 2 cars on fire, thought it was something worse,thank god they got it soaked with water.
There were 2 news cameras that also up. I am glad everyone in the building was ok; yes from the fire but from the smoke that was pouring up from underneath. In the end there were a few cop cars, 7 or 8 fire trucks, ambulance and a good few people.
One good thing, though all this is very bad, the cars on fire horns kept going off- almost weird way of waring people

Car Fire

[emmabebi.livejournal.com]

Yes its kinda worrying when my car alarm went off and I see it in flames with the other car which looked like wax that was melting.

Very sad new car (3 months old)
no contact info of the other lady whose car started burning first!

Hell!

Did anyone else NOT notice the fire alarm?

[stompey5.livejournal.com]

Did anyone else get woken up by the car horn going off rather than the actual fire alarm in the building? If I had my portable a/c on I would have never heard the car horn OR alarm. Lucky for me I didn't have the air on and decided to get up and check out the noise. When realized something was very wrong, I woke up the roommate (who didn't hear anything due to having a fan on), grabbed the pet chinchillas and bolted down the smoke filled stairs.

I think our management company needs to update the fire alarm system, badly.

Re: Did anyone else NOT notice the fire alarm?

[shaybay251.livejournal.com]

I'm very upset by this. It is disturbing to think that people could have been trapped inside simply because they didn't hear the fire alarm. I don't think it went off on the 5th floor and it definitely didn't go off in my apartment.

And how come the management company didn't at least call us individually to make sure we were OK? There was a significant amount of smoke in some of the apartments.

News and Journal articles

[ron_newman]

Somerville News -- mostly just quotes from this LJ post, but also has a statement from Somerville Police Captain Paul Upton.

Somerville Journal article

[guava6982.livejournal.com]

My husband and I just returned from our honeymoon yesterday and discovered the fire damage. We didn't know what happened, so we ran up the stairs to our apartment, afraid for the worst. Fortunately, our cat is fine, as is our apartment. We saw a guy repairing a washing machine, so we asked if he knew what happened, and we got the story. I couldn't believe that there were no signs posted, and neither of us had gotten a phone call about it. We would have been completely in the dark until we found someone to ask.I was relieved to hear that everyone got out ok. Hopefully there wasn't too much damage to any of the apartments, but I heard that over $100,000 of damage was done to the building.

[sweet-semicolon.livejournal.com]

There were signs posted next to the elevators on all the floors and on the doors, perhaps your floor's sign had been pulled down by someone by the time you guys returned. Glad you had no damage!

[ron_newman]

Police arrest man in Highland Ave. arsons. Yay!

S-M-R-T

[http://users.livejournal.com/_mattt/]

"Nichols allegedly left his cell phone in one of the cars he set on fire."

Way to go dumbass.

"Police said he also made an incriminating statement in an interview. He was arrested and charged with arson, breaking and entering and burning a motor vehicle."

I wonder if he'll do 25 years for this...