This week,after a fire in my New York apartment block, I had to construct that decision – at speedThere is a lot of siren noise in New York City. It howls through the canyons between skyscrapers to shake the windows and shatter the nerves. I am always complaining about it: my neighbourhood, or a collection of residential and office blocks,has a fire house at its centre and every night we are woken by another emergency. More than once I enjoy speculated that the fire crews achieve on their sirens at 3am not because they need to, but because it is fun.
I will not be making that observation again after this morning, and when as usual I took the elevator down 13 floors to the lobby. Around the seventh floor,smoke started to pour in. When the doors opened on the ground floor, it was to one of those scenes you judge you will never see: a wall of smoke so thick you couldn’t find your hand in front of your face. The air smelled of burning plastic. My two babies burst into tears and started violently coughing.
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Source: theguardian.com