Fire at the gym!

I went to the gym this afternoon for classes in step and weight lifting. After finishing my workout, I showered, and got dressed in the locker room. As I was finishing up, I thought, "What's that smell? It sort of smells like smoke." I peaked my head out of the aisle, towards the back of the locker room, where the sauna and showers are. I thought the air looked a bit smokey, and I saw a girl talking on her cell phone, and overheard her saying things like "fire in the sauna."

Nothing was happening at this point (i.e., no fire alarms were going off). I wandered down there to see what was happening. The door to the sauna is glass, so you can see in. When I had passed it on my way to the shower earlier, I noted that there wasn't anyone inside, that I could see. But now I couldn't see much through the glass, it was all smokey. There was also a bit of smoke hanging in the air outside it.

This means that in the 15-20 minutes between the time I walked to the showers and the time I saw the smoke, a fire started in the sauna. I don't know how. There's a lot of wood in it, and it gets pretty hot; maybe something spontaneously combusted. :)

Another girl was there checking it out too, and we had a brief conversation about how we wondered what was going on and if it had been reported. I left the locker room at that point to make sure that it had been -- and yes, it had been. (The girl on the cell phone was indeed on the phone with the authorities, and not her roommate or something -- hey, you never know.) As I walked toward the exit, the alarms finally started going off. My first thought was, "Darn, that means I can't get that strawberry smoothie I wanted." (Seriously.) I left the gym (with everyone else), and waited around a few minutes, just to see what happened. I could hear emergency vehicles in the distance that eventually reached us.

Within minutes, there were 5 fire trucks parked in front, along with a few other emergency vehicles. The fire fighters geared up (in full uniform) and walked into the gym, some carrying fire extinguishers, other carrying axes. I lingered for awhile and watched, but nothing terribly exciting happened. I left before everything was in order, since I figured I should probably do some work today.

Not long after returning to my office, I received the following campus-wide email:

Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:06:03 -0500
Subject: Official: Fire in Gregory Gymnasium

A fire occurred today, April 29, 2008 in Gregory Gymnasium (GRE) around 2:30 p.m. More information will follow as it becomes available.

And after awhile, we received the promised follow up information with this email:

Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:21:34 -0500
Subject: Official: Update on Gregory Gym fire

Earlier today a fire in a Gregory Gym sauna resulted in a general alarm and evacuation of the building. The fire was contained in the sauna and the building was cleared for re-entry around 3:45 p.m.

Of course, the people I feel really sorry for are the staff at the gym. I noticed signs up today saying that essentially the entire bottom floor of the gym (including the cardio area, the gym store, the wellness area, etc.) was closed. Based on my own observations, which were confirmed by chatting with my friend that works there, they had a big flood this weekend, caused by a pipe bursting. So they were busy dealing with that mess, and then this happened! Oy vey. It's probably going to be a long day for them.

What I'm most relieved of is that I didn't have to evacuate the gym wearing a towel. Had all this happened about 5 minutes earlier, I probably would have. Do you think this guy did? (My hope is that he was just in the pool.)