Close call

Hoboken Fire Leaves People Homeless: MyFoxNY.com

I never had daughters, so I’m especially fond of my nieces. We had a close call last night when one of them was in this building fire in Hoboken NJ. (She’s the younger sister of the marine biologist.) Thank God she’s so athletic, because when she couldn’t get out through the entrance way, she had to jump from the second-floor window to the building next door. (She also led three people to safety, my brother tells me.)

She’s such a good kid, I’m so sorry she had to go through this but so very glad we didn’t lose her.

When I talked to her this morning, I asked how far she had to jump. She said about four feet. “You know, whenever I saw that roof, I’d say to myself, ‘Yeah, I could jump that if I had to,'” she said. And she did.

Moral of the story: Keep a “go bag”. She lost her birth certificate, passport, etc. and has to rebuild all that from scratch — which, as you probably already know, is a massive pain in the ass.

Second moral of the story: The building’s alarm system went off accidentally a while ago, and everything worked: Lights, sirens, etc. This time, nothing. (I’m thinking they couldn’t figure out why it was going off, so they turned it off.) TEST YOUR ALARM SYSTEMS.