I smelled smoke just a bit ago yes­ter­day and saw quite a bit blow­ing past my win­dow. Turns out a fire had just started in an almost empty house a block south of me. The down­stairs res­i­dents had vacated a week ear­lier, and the upstairs fel­low got out before the fire started. The address is 3279 West 17^th Street, just north of Metro Hos­pi­tal. I called it in to 911 and it had already been reported. Fire trucks from Sta­tions 20, 24 and 4 were on the scene right away. The nearby Fire Sta­tion 21, which has been closed, wasn’t on the scene. I grabbed my cam­era, took some video, and after I saw that some stringers from WKYC showed up, decided to see if I could get the video online before them. This ain’t gonna hap­pen since com­press­ing and export­ing from Final Cut took frig­gin’ for­ever and upload­ing an 800MB file to YouTube ain’t no speed-​along nei­ther [been upload­ing for 5 hours, now going to bed]. Nar­rated using my best smarmy weblog­ger voice.

Update: the fire was arson: