Living in a multi-family dwelling (aka apartment building) can be an interesting thing. There is good (neighbors who share flan) and bad (party guests who decide to wrestle at one in the morning, right in front of your neighbor's window). It also means that, particularly if there are enough of you, all it takes is one person's smoke detector going unattended, and, well, everyone is tromping down the stairs at three in the morning. And even with all those neighbors, I don't always hear what happened. So, having a resource like the DCFIREEMS Twitter account is useful. It lets me know if all those fire trucks are racing towards my building and if everyone's okay. It lets me know if that traffic backup due to the injured pedestrian is close to being cleared. In fact, it kind of does what Twitter was really intended for. So, I am saddened to hear that the employee who had managed the account for a while has been moved to a new position and they are hoping that the new person will be, shall we say, less effective in the dissemination of information. This is a big city. Not every fire even makes the news. (Not to give the impression that DC is a hotbed of fires, but let's face it, only on a slow news day does a fire where no one was hurt tend to get even a passing mention.) And, even if they did, often by the time the news covers it, it's hours later. I don't think it's ridiculous to want to know now. And my alternative is to bug people who should be, you know, putting out the fire. I'm hoping this decision gets changed. (Again. This has already flip flopped once this year. Here's hoping for one more.)
In the interim, the firefighter's union has taken over some of this.
h/t to TBD for the link to the Atlantic.
Rants About New (and old) Things
