Saw this in the Chicago Tribune today, thought some of you might enjoy it.
Put a lot of those JW "worldy people" stories to rest. No mention of witnesses reaching out here !
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/ct-news-hageman-fire-20100327,0,5478590.story
chicagotribune.com
Aurora house fire restores faith in people
It took a house fire to make reporter William Hageman see the good in people
By William Hageman, Tribune reporter
March 28, 2010
I was standing on a sidewalk across the street from my house. And I was watching it burn.
An electrical fire was working its way through the third floor of our 120-year-old home. Three dozen Aurora firefighters were on the scene, doing what they could to save the house.
All my wife, Dona, and I could do was watch.
When you think about something like this happening to you — and most of us, I suppose, think of these things only fleetingly because they are so disturbing — you imagine a sort of frantic horror, or a kick-to-the-gut feeling as part of your life disappears. Maybe Dona and I were in shock. But all we could do was watch.
She had smelled smoke that early-March morning, called 911, grabbed our two German shepherds and got out safely. The fire was extinguished in an hour. Most important, everybody was OK. Dona, the dogs, all the firefighters.
What was lost was stuff. Just stuff. What we came away with was, well, incredible.
It started while the fire was still burning. I hadn't managed to get home yet. Dona alternated between standing on the curb and sitting in the back seat of a police car.
A woman from down the street — I apologize to her, but I don't even know her name — brought Dona shoes, a jacket and a blanket so she could stay warm. As a fashion statement, it wasn't much. As an act of kindness, it was unforgettable.
Other neighbors gathered. They asked what we needed, they offered us places to stay, they asked if they could take in the dogs. One neighbor — again, someone we know only casually — came over to the police car and took Dona's hand to console her. When I pulled up, our cable guy — our cable guy — was giving Dona a hug. A woman I never saw before embraced Dona, told us her address, and said we were welcome to stay with her family if we needed to. The couple across the street said they'd do whatever we needed, then she found us listings for five potential rentals. In minutes we had more than a half-dozen offers of shelter.
I always knew we had a close neighborhood and good neighbors, but this, this outpouring, was amazing.
"That totally impressed me, when this was all going on and the next day when people stopped by," said Pat Pristave, our next-door neighbor, whom I talked to again about a week after the fire. She left work when she heard about the fire and that afternoon provided shelter for the dogs in her home and gave us a bag of necessities when we headed to a hotel that evening. And the next day she gave us a set of new towels.
"People were asking, ‘Can I do something?' ‘Can I bring something over?' ‘What do they need?'
"I don't know if we'd experience that in any other neighborhood. People were concerned. People you don't even know their names. People you don't know at all. They really wanted to help. They say there's no empathy anymore, but we saw it."
As the fire died out, someone — might have been one of the firefighters, might have been an Aurora police officer — confirmed what we suspected. The third floor was heavily damaged. But it wasn't too bad on the first or second floors, he said. They were relatively OK.
So we were surprised at what we saw when we were allowed to enter the house. Throughout the first floor were tarps — we had no idea firefighters threw down tarps — to catch the water pouring through light fixtures and dripping from collapsing ceilings. On the second floor, two bedrooms, the main bathroom and half the hallway were destroyed. The third floor was so bad that it will have to be leveled and rebuilt. First estimate was that we might be able to live in the house again in two or three months. But the more the insurance people and fire inspectors examined the damage, the longer the estimate got. Six months. Maybe 10.
As Dona and I walked through the debris, another neighbor appeared. He and his wife had had a house fire 18 years ago, so they knew what we were going through. He was armed with a dozen plastic totes, and he grabbed all the food from our fridge and freezers, took it home and stored it.
Want more? During the fire, the dogs were in a neighbor's yard, yelping and yipping, obviously stressed. A little girl on her way home from school — never set eyes on her before — saw what was happening. She became upset and told her mother — never met her before either — and they came over with dog treats.
This wonderfulness, this concern, has been amazing. Humbling. I'm rather cynical, and I generally don't think much of people. I subscribe to The 95 Percent Theory, which says that 95 percent of people are jerks. Only I usually use a word much stronger than "jerks." I may still believe in The 95 Percent Theory. But I had no idea that everybody I knew was part of the other 5 percent.
We have so many people to thank. And to be grateful for.
The insurance company found us a hotel within minutes, one that took dogs. They offered to rent us a house and as much furniture as we needed. We found a place nearby and told the State Farm adjuster the rent, and he wrote us a check on the spot to cover six months.
The firefighters and police were magnificent. Those tarps? They weren't just thrown over the floors. The firemen also moved pieces of furniture together — a heavy oak sideboard and an upright piano in the dining room, for example — and covered them. They took pictures down and put them on the floor facing the walls to lessen smoke damage. And it seemed that not five minutes went by without one of the firefighters coming over to make sure we were OK. Even the post-fire cleanup crew, guys who see a lot of fires, commented on the professionalism, speed and skill of Aurora's fire department.
"When we go to these fires, we see people are distraught. It's a huge impact on their life, you know?" Mark Lockwood, assistant chief in charge of operations for the Aurora Fire Department, said when I talked to him again last week. "We've been in situations like that ourselves. So we really feel for people. We do tell our firefighters, from day one of training, treat these people with respect. They're your bosses, and they're going through a traumatic time in their life. And treat their property the way you'd want your property treated."
And the police. As I stood there watching the fire, I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was an Aurora cop. All he said: "It's going to be OK." That small gesture meant so much. Police officers and firefighters alike stopped by in the days after the fire, just to see how we were doing.
But it is our friends and the people I work with who have touched us most. Even as the fire burned, the e-mails poured in. "I can take your dogs." "Do you need a place to stay?" "I can come out tonight with a truck to help you move stuff out." "I can come out and walk the dogs or wash your walls." "We'll take you and Dona and the dogs." "We're talking about grabbing a (company) car and coming out." (One co-worker offered to take Dona and the dogs, conveniently forgetting me, but, hey, I'm part of that 95 percent anyway.)
The night of the fire, I sat at a laptop in the hotel room, eating a takeout order of sesame chicken and answering those e-mails. Dona was asleep, nearly crowded out of the bed by two dogs that couldn't get close enough. Over and over, I read these simple messages offering support and help.
I cracked open the fortune cookie.
"Your wealth is where your friends are."