Smoke over Green Sport.. Feb 25, 2011

Fire in the sky! (Add your own thumping bass line.)

My friend Beth and I were enjoying dinner on the second floor of the Blue Frog, a restaurant in our "mall", when we realized something was out of the ordinary. No one was panicking, but there dark clouds of smoke billowing past the restaurant windows.

I, of course, had to go investigate, being the incurable nosey-parker that I am.  I hopped over a short fence and ran up the sloping mall roof to get this shot.

This is what I saw. I hope you can at least make out the flames below and the figures. It wasn't snowing, that was ash. Remember that huge Chinese New Year display? That big red ark? It was no more.

The pictures weren't coming out well.
Then I remembered I had video technology. 

Be afraid, be very afraid.

Wendy Mesley I'm not, but you get a feel for the situation. 

I couldn't upload the first video for the life of me. That's fine as the second video is the more interesting of the two and that's all I'm going to say about that. Hmmmm. I'd hate to have Uncle M_ _(you know who) shut down my blog and given that it was "unavailable" this morning (March 3), you never know. I'm posting this while I can so please excuse any sloppy writing.

Anyway, that's one way to get rid of a gigantic styrofoam barge. I was sorry I had missed the worst of the fire. Oh, well. There's always next year.


The clean-up was quite the production. The second the blaze was put out, there were workers swarming all around the charred metal frame, taking it apart, with other workers bashing away at the burnt remains and scrubbing the scorched tiles.

It was incredibly noisy. The sparks from the saws-all were pretty impressive.

High powered jets of water

All to no avail. The tiles were still scarred.


So, the next morning, they decided to try and fight fire with fire to remove the damage.

Even that didn't work, so the tiles were replaced.

There...that's much better!

It wasn't until the next day that I noticed this sign:

Oops! 

Good thing I didn't see it in the dark!

Kids, do not try this at home.