Sunday Morning Wake-up Call

We were woken up this morning by our smoke detectors going off. But for us this usually means nothing- as they are very sensitive and go off anytime someone cooks something on the stove or in the oven without turning on the stove's hood fan. So as usually we fanned them off until they went off. The only problem was that no one was cooking, and they came back on again.
So, after a few minutes we went outside to visually inspect what was going on. Was someone BBQing in the backyard? No. We walk around out front to fine visible smoke appearing from in between our house and our neighbors house in an area that we could not fully see or get to. This is when we decided to call the fire department.
Within minutes there were two fire trucks outside and I was flagging them down.. (a total of 5 trucks ended up coming). Things were rather hecktic at first as the firemen were trying to figure out where this smoke was coming from. It seemed to be coming from a room or area that was not accessible. The fire chief was inspecting things and determined that to reach where the fire was from both sides, one of our walls would have to be demolished- the fire was partially located withing a small crawlspace underneath the main staircase to the apartment. So they took an axe to a wall in our hallway and made a nice sized hole (enough for a person to get through). From there they put out the small fire. All in all an interesting morning. Luckily, there was not much damage and no one was injured. I like to think that Aaron and I helped avoiding a serious situation by reacting quickly.

More (lower quality) pics HERE.

**EDIT: I just realized that I did not list the cause of this fire. It was determined by the fire chief to have been caused by someone dropping cigarette butts off the side of the stairwell and in between the houses. These butts landed on some garbage and leaves and such and ignited the fire- which luckily did not spread far before fire fighters arrived and were able to put it out. Thanks again to the SFFD for being quick to respond and extinguish the fire.