Mr. Dump called me from Aubachon Hardware (on Rt 12/North Main Street) to tell me that fire engines from 4 different communities appeared to be dealing with something near the Fitchburg line. Like near the MART garage. There was no smoke, but there were fire engines and ambulances.
There is no way on the planet to find out what is going on in a timely manner unless it’s some sort of MAJOR happening that gets picked up by the news wires. Nothing on the Telegram or Sentinel (no duh) websites either. Now for the latter, even if they had a reporter helping to put out a fire, it wouldn’t make their website until tomorrow afternoon. It really isn’t reporting “news,” it’s reporting “olds”.
Anyhoo, apparently there were lots of trucks and at least one was from Devens. That is some serious mutual aid if they’re sending fire trucks from Devens. And yet, I know nothing. He didn’t go near it, he had to go home and put the new spool of string on the trimmer. They discontinued our trimmer, doncha know. And Amazon said it could take one to four weeks to ship a replacement pack to us. Holy jungle cruise, Batman! In 4 weeks we won’t be able to locate the dog if he stands near the fence!
So these are my two complaints of the day:
- I want every single piece of information that might impact me in any way to be instantly available on the Internet. Every day, all day.
- Aubachon Hardware – why the hell have you allowed squatters to own your domain? What the hell?! They cannot possibly have a claim to [DON’T CLICK IT!] aubachonhardware.com. Geez, what a stupid move! How the hell are people supposed to find you if they cannot type in the most logical domain name? That’s it, I’m having Mr. Dump call them to yell at them.
I had the same complaint the other day when I noticed smoke drifting through the neighborhood. I wondered if there might be some sort of brush fire nearby, but I was unable to find out anything on the internet. With modern technology we should be able to know everything immediately.
You’ll have to get a radio scanner like my mom has – she’s always listening to all the ‘activity’ going on from the police/fire/ambulance dispatchers and often knows what’s going on long before anyone else hears of it in the Fitchburg/Leominster area.
I’ll see if she heard anything about it…
Hi Jody,
For local town news I use Topix.Net. They’re pretty good.
My Dad always had a police radio in the house and whenever stuff was going on he always knew about it. Maybe you should invest in a police radio?
And actually I just glanced at Topix.Net and I think I may have found what you wanted to know about:
http://www.topix.com/city/fitchburg-ma/2007/05/firefighters-battle-leominster-blaze
But we had a scanner, and you have to leave it on all the time. By the time you smell smoke or hear sirens they’re done announcing what the problem is (usually). Plus, he was in the car across town and I’m at work, so the scanner would do us little to no good.
Foo, with everyone buying those damned backyard fire pits, the whole summer it smells like the world is on fire. Not good if you have allergies. We had to turn off the window fan last night because it was blowing the smell into the bedroom.
And Chuck, that’s not the right story. It’s a darned good one, but it’s not “our fire”. South Street in Leominster is between Central St. and Union St. (I looked it up). This would have been somewhere around Battles and Nichols Streets, I think. (And Topixnet pulls from the Telegram and the Sentinel, usually, so it’s not usually my first choice for breaking news. But I do have an RSS feed from it on my Yahoo page. (How are you feeling, by the way?)
If there was a real town emergency it would be on WEIM 1280 and also on 1620 (normally has weather on it). 1620 is a low power unit near the Rt 2 Johnny Appleseed area. Remember AM radio ?
If you are home, there will be soon a hookup on the cable tv from local Emergency Mgmt.
For weather, all schools now have weather radios that go off in sever alerts.
I went by the South St fire scene this morning, third floor is almost completely gone. Horrible fire.
CU
Jerry