More thoughts
Jun. 15th, 2017 12:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lovingbothOne of the reasons why I suspect that the recent Grenfell Tower disaster was down to the refurbishment was my late father.
He was a fireman through the 60s, 70s and a big chunk of the 80s. He stayed at the sub-officer level because, unlike the officers, they went out on the shouts. So he'd been to a lot of incidents before health problems meant he shifted to fire safety.
One memory from my childhood is going to the AmDram theatre my mother had been part of when she was younger. We were in the balcony and he was VERY uncomfortable, to the point that we left at the interval.
The place burnt down a few years later. Fortunately no-one was in it, because anyone in the balcony would have been in trouble: the pre-war small theatre had a narrow wooden staircase up to it. It got rebuilt with a wider concrete one. He'd go back then.
For some years, he was at a station responsible for a stretch of the M1. There were types of car he wouldn't go in. (If he could have afforded one, he'd have had a Saab.)
There was one shop in the town centre he wouldn't go in.
Once during a fire alarm, my sister's teacher kept them back until they'd been given their homework. Let's just say they never did that again.
When I lived on the third floor of a house, he checked that there was a ladder escape.
But he never had a problem with going into a tower block. He'd been to fires in them, but he trusted the designs would contain any incident not involving a gas explosion until people could be rescued.
And that's what didn't happen this week.
He was a fireman through the 60s, 70s and a big chunk of the 80s. He stayed at the sub-officer level because, unlike the officers, they went out on the shouts. So he'd been to a lot of incidents before health problems meant he shifted to fire safety.
One memory from my childhood is going to the AmDram theatre my mother had been part of when she was younger. We were in the balcony and he was VERY uncomfortable, to the point that we left at the interval.
The place burnt down a few years later. Fortunately no-one was in it, because anyone in the balcony would have been in trouble: the pre-war small theatre had a narrow wooden staircase up to it. It got rebuilt with a wider concrete one. He'd go back then.
For some years, he was at a station responsible for a stretch of the M1. There were types of car he wouldn't go in. (If he could have afforded one, he'd have had a Saab.)
There was one shop in the town centre he wouldn't go in.
Once during a fire alarm, my sister's teacher kept them back until they'd been given their homework. Let's just say they never did that again.
When I lived on the third floor of a house, he checked that there was a ladder escape.
But he never had a problem with going into a tower block. He'd been to fires in them, but he trusted the designs would contain any incident not involving a gas explosion until people could be rescued.
And that's what didn't happen this week.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-06-15 10:15 pm (UTC)