I walk a lonely road...............The only one that I have ever known

so there was an amazingly huge fire on our campus yesterday... heres a picture that shows how huge i mean:


(photo by Dean Hoffmeyer / Richmond Times-Dispatch)

yeah, my mom called at about 12:45 (10 minutes after it had started) to make sure i was okay, because she saw flames in my general direction. I walked outside and saw half the sky covered in black smoke. the first two things i thought were 'oh crap i hope thats not the other dorm' - and 'oh crap i hope thats our dining center'

so eric and jeff, my suitemate, and i walked out to look around. Jeff had his camera and took some pictures on the way.



turns out it was the construction for an aparment building that vcu was leasing part of for student housing this fall. meaning people who had signed up there were gonna have some problems. I called my friend bryan, to make sure he knew what was going on, and to tell him i'd thought it was his dorm at first. he tells me yeah, he's been watching the whole thing from the roof of a different apartment building.



He said he'd been getting it on video, and I wondered how he always managed to get the best views (he got to meet michelle branch when she played on campus last fall).


(photo by Bob Brown / Richmond Times-Dispatch)

you have to have been there to realize how huge this fire was. we ended up hearing some rumors that it had been started in the dumpster and trash chute by a cigarette that a worker tossed.



This picture was taken minutes after the fire started, and you can see the dumpster and chute already engulfed in flames. when my mom called 10 minutes after it had started, the flames were large enough to be seen from the third floor of a school she was in across town.



I'm pretty sure this was the peak of the blaze, probably about the time my mom called me. You can really see how much work had been done on this building here.



I'm pretty sure we got there around 25-30 minutes after it had started, and this is what we saw. The whole middle part of the building is GONE.



This shot really shows how much the fire ravaged the building. well, we watched the firefighters work for a while, and just as we thought it was all getting under control, i was like "hey guys... whats all that black smoke further back?"



the fire had jumped broad street (four lane road with wide median), done some damage to the vcu arts building, and caught some houses and buildings behind it on fire. You can really see how far the fire jumped, starting another large fire further back, as well as a few small ones along broad street. In the above picture, take a look at the building towards the left with a little bit of brown smoke coming from it. When Jeff and I went back saturday, we found that the walls of this building were mostly gone, and the fire had caused the second floor to collapse onto the first.


(photo by Lindy Keast Rodman / Richmond Times-Dispatch)

we walked around and realized it had spread two blocks past broad street too. Jeff and i saw a house with smoke pouring out of the windows, and firefighters battling to get it under control. at one point they seemed to, but we heard later that the whole block got burned pretty badly. broad street was still closed down today, and fire trucks were still pouring water on the original building. basically it was a big ass fire.

I'll update this entry later with some more pictures.