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PrintReader Brad Wilmot sent us the earliest photos of Sunday morning's apartment fire, and he later contributed this file of edited scanner traffic from Sunday morning and afternoon. He works as a dispatcher for the Truman Veterans Hospital.
- Reader Brad Wilmot sent us this photo of the scene of an apartment fire in Columbia on Sunday morning. See more of his images here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/baldbrad/
- Reader Brad Wilmot heard about this morning's fire on his scanner, and he took this photo of the blaze out of his apartment window.
Brad said this about the audio: I regularly stream the fire/EMS scanner to RadioReference.com, so I just copied the files to my computer, edited them, and dropped them into a software called Vegas to make a "video" so I could upload it to YouTube. The traffic was edited for dead air and for calls unrelated to the fire. It started out about 13 hours long, and I edited it down to just under two hours.
This story is part of a section of the Missourian called From Readers, which is dedicated to your voices and your stories. We hope you'll consider sharing. Here's how. Supervising editor is Joy Mayer.
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Comments
Wow, that was intense. What a great From Readers piece! Keep up the good work, readers (and Missourian)!
Anyone know what "switch to brown" means? (About the 2:06 mark.) Is that a radio channel? A type of turn out gear?
"switch to brown" is a request to change channels to the fireground channel. Fire channels are color coded so city and county fire can interoperate without worrying about which channel is in which position in their radios.
What did this fire cost the city of Columbia fire department, this had to be a major expense , does the property owners insurance help with the expense incurred by CFD. for the cost of this fire?
@Frank, that's a great question, and we have a reporter working on it. Stay tuned.
Joy Mayer,
Columbia Missourian
@Frank,
According to Columbia's Fire Chief Chuck Witt, the fire department always has expenses it has to take care of, and after the Brookside fire, it had about $4,500 more than it normally would have at this time.
Witt also said that they did not bill the property owner's insurance company because the department provided a service it would provide to anyone else. However, the fire at O'Reilly's on Business Loop 70 required extra machinery to be called in, and it did end up having to bill that insurance company.
Thank you for your questions!
Megan LaManna
Reporter for the Columbia Missourian