Thursday, February 18, 2010

Accidentally In The Middle

"That's a fireball," Karen said. Karen sits about fifteen feet away from me at work, and she has an office with a nice window view. We work on the fifth floor.

"What?" I asked.

"A fireball," she said, sounding shocked. "And there's smoke."

I walked over to her desk, looked out the window toward where she was pointing, and saw smoke pouring from a building about a quarter mile from our office.

The building she pointed to was near the intersection of one of the busiest sports in the whole city--three major highways intersect within a few hundreds yards. Those roads are busy twenty-four hours a day, and since it was just past rush hour (just a little before 10 a.m.), hundreds of drivers must have seen the fireball, too.

Within less than ten minutes, I saw at least half a dozen fire trucks and a dozen police cards racing to the scene, as well as multiple ambulances. It was surreal. And the amount of smoke pouring from the building was staggering.

So this is now the lead national story, because as it turns out, it was a small plane that flew into the building. Which turns out to have an IRS office inside. And the pilot of the plane flew it into the building intentionally.

Welcome to nutbag world.

In another incredible coincidence, this guy lived less than two miles from our house, and only a few hundred yards from where we've eaten breakfast every weekend for the last five years. I've unicycled within thirty yards of the guy's house before. He apparently posted this note just a few days ago, and clearly, the guy was a hardcore hater.

Here's a link to a photo gallery, and believe it or not, I joined the gawkers and drove by on 183 solely for the purpose of taking some video, which I did. And if it will ever finish snail-uploading to YouTube, I'll post the link, because it's startling. It's only about thirty seconds in length, but it's in 720P and razor sharp.

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