So, I was sort of thinking about not mentioning this since it's embarrassing, but last night I burned the back side of my house pretty bad with some poor charcoal management. Had three fire departments respond, I was *really* lucky that the fire didn't get into the attic. I got to put a fire out with a garden hose then watch the fire guys tear my house apart looking for something smoldering.
One of my upstairs renters looked outside to a wall of fire and called 911. This is roughly the same point in time I realized my house was on fire, and ran out back to get the garden hose (which was luckily just far enough from the fire to not get burned/melted), put the fire out downstairs, then went up on the deck to put it out upstairs. He's a little melodramatic, and apparently told the dispatcher that the entire house was engulfed in flames, because the 911 dispatcher was very forceful to him that we needed to evacuate the house. I told him to piss off, and went into the attic to see if there was any fire up there. Apparently my first reaction when my house is on fire isn't to take instruction from people trying to help, it's to put some damn water on the fire so my house doesn't burn down.
So, the message the firefighters get from dispatch (after talking to the chief for a while) is "fully involved housefire, four occupants refusing to vacate."
The whole friggin' cavalry showed up. At one point in time I think I had nine emergency vehicles from three departments around my house. Which, by the way, is not on fire anymore. They had their little heat sensing camera that could tell where any hot spots were, so they beat out some holes in the ceiling/wall, tramped around the house, then we had to wait an hour for the fire investigator to show up and make a report.
The really embarrassing part is that my dad just retired after 35 years in a local fire department, I called him to see what was going on, so he puts on his "retired firefighter" coat and comes out - which I wanted him to do, but I gave him #### for the wardrobe change before he came over. He's going to give me #### for setting my house on fire for years.
Everything's fine, everybody's ok, my roof is still on, and I'm probably not going to get to that first batch of beer brewing on Thursday like I'd hoped.
edit:
view from my front yard last night