Fire!

This building Fletch and I live in is an old converted paper mill parked squarely on the edge of a river. It has been utilised by various organisations since the long forgotten when days it actually milled paper, it was Clive Sinclair's company headquarters in the heady days of the ZX Spectrum and the infamous C5 and then later became the local police HQ until some property developer saw fit to 'develop' it and it became what it is today.

The building houses approx. 36 flats all inhabited by either retired people looking for a bijoux little spot on the river to see out their days or yuppy types who are rarely ever here....and then there is us who fall into neither category and in my case who is always here! And thereby hangs the tale.

There is of course a fire alarm system but quite why, other than to fulfill building regs. I have no idea because it sounds with such regular monotony everyone bar me it seems, has tuned it out in the firm belief that it is just another old duffer burning their breakfast toast! Which of course it is, but one day it just might not be...and do they care? Nope, seemingly not!

I have lost count of the times I have scrabbled into some clothes in a hurry, gathered up life's essentials (handbag, phone, lappy, Hammy....she fits nicely in my handbag for safe-keeping)) equally rapidly and bowled out onto the landing to find maybe, at the very most, only two or three velour and gold-lame slippered residents wandering about aimlessly asking me if they 'really need to go downstairs'! Ack!

The whole issue seems ridiculous, I don't know what current fire safety law requires and my days married to a fireman are so long gone I don't recall now exacely what they used to be, but here is a building with a high number of elderly and in many cases very infirm residents and we don't qualify, it would seem, for an 'automatic turn out' from the local fire station. Add to that, the regularly of the alarms means very few people take a blind bit of notice and even if they did, in a fire the lifts shouldn't be used and most of them aren't able to exit via the stairs!

No-one seems to know how to turn the alarm off, no-one but me understands the fire panel as far as I can tell, no-one has a key to turn it off anyways and despite my attempts at trying to get some information and assuming some responsibility for the situation, I have had no success. Add to that, whilst the alarm is tested weekly there has never been a drill in the time we have been here and in the event of an alarm or a fire we, the residents (that would likely be me then I suppose) are supposed to call the janitor guy....who lives five miles away and only has a push bike for transport! How freaking helpful, not!

One day, mark my words, something nasty is going to happen in this building and maybe then someone will start asking a question or two!