All right. How to start this other than ... holy shit. Yesterday at about 2:30AM, a fire started in the hospital about a block from where I go to class. My roommate and I were woken up that morning by a phone call telling us what had happened. The entire area was in utter fucking chaos for practically the entire day. Every few minutes another ambulance would rush out of there, usually taking an intensive care patient to another hospital. That is what got me the most, is the fact that this was in a hospital. People were in that hospital that could not do SHIT to get out of there. If you are having a heart operation and a fire breaks out, what the fuck is one to do?

I have heard that the total dead is around 20, which could have been a lot worse but fuck, that is still twenty lives lost. The damage done was estimated to be around $20 million. A friend who lives across the street from the hospital said she heard explosions, which shook the entire house and she thought people were outside banging on her window with guns. Apparently it was some sort of gas explosion that started the fire, in an old building of the hospital that had no alarms, no emergency lights, and no emergency exit. How fucking barbaric.

Some of the footage I have seen has made me sick to my stomach. People tying bedsheets together and rappelling down the wall to the ground. Ladders that could not reach the people standing on window ledges of the top floor to avoid the smoke. Elderly patients being brought out in wheelchairs. Families of those in the hospital having breakdowns outside in the street. But what got me the most was the images inside the charred hospital of the bodies, covered in a white sheet, still in their hospital beds. They died without moving, because they couldnt. Bodies underneath beds, probably trying to get away from the smoke and fire.

I went and stood at the hospital today and just stared at it for a long time. The bedsheet that patients used to climb down from the 4th story is still there. All I did was stand there in disbelief as news crews scrambled to get a good angle for the 6 o clock story, and others stood and stared with disbelief as well. Its just so hard to believe that a few days earlier I may have been eating at restaurants in that area with the same nurses or supervisors that died in the fire.

Another weird thought I had was that only a few days earlier I had been walking to our favorite lunch spot by the hospital, and I watched some workers unloading giant tanks of gases (probably nitrous or oxygen) off a big truck and into the hospital. I remember thinking how big of an explosion it would be if one of those got knocked over onto a sharp rock or something. And then a couple days later there is a fire and 20 people die. Go figure.

Read the story.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4675479.stm