Three Alarm Fire, Appleton St, off Willow

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

Woken by fire trucks at 2:30 in the morning. It's a three alarm fire on Appleton St. off Willow. Contained to the one house, plus a live wire down. From what I could glean from the scanner, everyone seems to have gotten out of the house, but some people were taken to the hospital.

Now (3:15am) at the one-hour mark, it's still an active fire, but fire command on site has declined help from an additional company, and are saying "condition the same, companies making progress."

At 3:20am calling for a "20-foot collapse zone around the building. Slate shingles coming off the room, eminent [immanent?] danger of the chimney collapsing."
(does that mean they evacuate the houses on either side, I would assume?)

From my house I can see that Willow is shut down, and the bike path, so expect a similar 4 block radius.

Comments

[keithn.livejournal.com]

I'm glad there were no serious injuries and I hope those impacted find housing immediately. The emergency personnel and equipment in Somerville and the surrounding communities are top notch and we're lucky to have them. It looks like the fire spread extremely quickly after it started and was quite intense and yet there were no serious injuries and the fire was contained to a single building.

I was woken up by what turned out to be a news helicopter at 5am, repeatedly flying over my apartment as it circled the scene of the fire. I fully support police and fire helicopters flying anywhere at any time in the interest of public safety, but I really do not think news helicopters should be circling over densely populated areas in the early morning in the interest of gawking at a fire for ratings. Not only did it wake me up, but it caused me to be unnecessarily concerned that perhaps a police helicopter was chasing someone suspected of a crime through my neighborhood. I really hope this doesn't happen again, but I'm not sure who has control of this kind of thing.

[miss-chance.livejournal.com]

I agree approximately 1000 percent about how something, Idk noise ordinances?, should apply to news helicopters gawking at a story after it happened. I don't actually trust laws to work that way, because anything that limits the press these days makes me nervous, but seriously the fuel, and noise, and anxiety from constant helicopters really sucks.

Speaking of .. it's after 12 noon now and my block is surrounded by helicopter sounds. How did you ID the ones that woke you up as news choppers? I want to know what I'm hearing now.

[keithn.livejournal.com]

I identified it by going on Twitter and searching for Somerville to see what was going on and finding this tweet with a timestamp that lines up with when I heard the loud helicopter: https://twitter.com/NVermaNBCBoston/status/824921260593405952

I don't know if there were any emergency services helicopters flying around last night in addition to this news helicopter, but if they were, they weren't the ones that woke me up.