After the fire.
By Tor
13 Oct 2009
For Thanksgiving my parents, my fiancee, Allison and I go to Algonquin Park to stay in a seasonal resort for the last open weekend.
This has been the tradition for quite a number of years so we always reserve a private two room cabin that has a common room with a fireplace and a long couch.
The night after Thanksgiving, Allie and I had just said "Goodnight" to my mom who had decided to stay up in the common room to read with the newly stoked fire and my dad who was already in bed. Five minutes later, Allie was in bed waiting to watch a movie with me on my laptop and I was in the bathroom washing my face when my mom ran in shouting
"We're on fire! We're on fire!"
The room was a lot smokier than it was five minutes ago but it still took us a few moments to set us in motion.
A panel in the chimney had corroded away and the heat from the fireplace had reached into the attic and ignited into a fire.
Allie was fasting thinking and got me to get her a lamp and ran outside with the fire extinguisher to calm the flames now coming out of the roof while my mom called the emergency number for the office.
The staff were very quick to respond to the first fire in over fifteen years. They arrived with cart filled with fire extinguishers one ran into our room and jumped up into the panel in our closet for the attic while everyone else was trying to get the flames from the outside.
It took them about forty minutes of continuous blasting for the staff to be convinced that the fire was successfully out.
We decided it might be a little too creepy to stay there the night and they wanted to monitored the cabin hourly but the accommodating staff were more than happy to make-up two rooms to stay in for the night.
We had already hastily shoved everything into our bags while the fire was being put out, but we only needed an overnight bag since we were checking out the next day.
The next morning after breakfast we all met back at the cabin and it was eerily cold. The temperature had dramatically dropped overnight, the smell still lingered from the fire, and the tools were still laying were they had been put the night before. The fire extinguishers were still outside on the western porch with burnt pieces of the roof, a latter was still laying against the northern wall to the roof with the top parts of the chimney strewn at the bottom and a fire hose laying outside on the ground against the eastern wall.
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