ah... fire...
When I was just fresh out of school, one of my first jobs was at a furniture store as a “junior salesman” (read dogsbody) Being as this was the late 70’s in Northern Ireland, perhaps working in a furniture store was not such a good idea… (Hindsight,, marvellous thing) Anyway, more of that later…

The store, being a rather old and rather big converted Victorian warehouse, was heated by 6 huge gas heaters (yes daft I know) and a smattering of “super ser” portable gas heaters, and my job on a winter morning was to light all these heaters.

Now, as the store owner was a bit tight, when the automatic starts failed on the heaters, rather than pay to get them fixed, they invented this marvellous system in that you had to light them by first turning on the gas cylinder (those big industrial ones) and then running around and chucking matches at the heating element until it “lit” (I can already feel the health and safety people twitching) these elements where located some 8 feet above ground in each “section” and on many occasions they would not light, and you had to nip back, and turn the gas off pretty sharpish.

One morning we entered the store to a strong smell of gas. Somebody had not turned off one of the heaters properly, and the gas had leaked. Lucky enough I had the sense to lock the front door, and then vent the place before explaining to the boss what had happened. Feeling chuffed with myself I went on with that days work.

About 2 hours later, I was sitting upstairs when I noticed a burning smell, I looked around to see a bed in the department next to mine well alight, (the only smoke alarm then was your nose) I ran up and hit the fire alarm, and went to get the fire extinguisher, ah.. Its not there. ? I ran down the front to be met by the head sales guy shouting for everybody to get out, as they just had a bomb warning, then the penny dropped.

We legged it out the front just in time for the device upstairs to go off big style. In about 30 minutes the place was a fireball, 12 fire engines fought the blaze for 6 hours and we just sat and watched as the big gas cylinders went off one by one like huge fireworks.

Later on I realised that had I tried to use the extinguisher on the fire, I would have been standing beside the main bomb as it went off. Nice. Seems they planted 2 bombs and 3 incendiaries, to make sure the place went up, as they thought we were selling goods to the army (we weren’t as it happened, but any excuse)

So, in one day the terrorists did to the store what we had been nearly doing to it for years. Did we get compo or counselling for our near death experience? Did we fuck… We all lost our jobs, and one of the guys got arrested for “giving information to terrorists.”
( TBL I posted this on, Thu 3 Nov 2005, 14:41, Reply)