AFD Chief Tim Nelson on the scene
Amherst Fire Department responded to a dryer fire around 1:00 PM at the Laundry Club on University Drive. Fire is out. The entire building was shut down for about an hour.
Smoke gets in your eyes
Ladder Truck 1 and Engine 2, a pumper, responded to the scene
9 comments:
Was this the fault of UMASS students too? Had to have been. There is a liquor store next to it. That can be the only reason this fire started. UMASS.
Well...sort of. The business definitely caters to "college aged youth" (as the Gazette would say).
And the fire most likely started from built up lint in the dryer from lots of use.
But (a lack of) routine maintenance is a better culprit than to blame the customers.
I hope you get tonights info with the weekend update from AFD. They are getting slammed as usual.
Yeah, I was listening on the scanner.
Dryer fires happen in homes too. I'm going to clean out the outtake hose.
I stopped going there last fall. The owner hired some schmuck more interested in having sex with his girlfriend on the sofa than letting people do their laundry.
Guy who owns it is pretty decent, but a really bad judge of whom he hires. This not the first fire they have had....
I can provide a completely scientific view as to whether UMass students were in any way responsible for the fire.
Liquor is very easily set on fire, because it contains the chemical Alcohol that is flammable. If there is a lot of liquor in one place, it may be easily to set on fire.
Therefore people who have had a lot of liquor recently will have a lot of alcohol vapors on their breathe, which can set on fire. From the dryer, which makes a large amount of heat. But a very large quantity of drinking must occur by many people for this to be possible
In sum and substance, it is very possible but not likely that students of UMass caused the fire.
Fire was caused by a female employee who opened the door of a smoking drier -- which then burst into flames. Adding oxygen to superheated flammable materials tends to do that.....
The kid who told me this also admitted that he had no idea how to shut off a drier if he had to. I asked him "what about the circuit breakers"?
He asked how he would know which one to shut off for a particular drier as apparently they aren't labeled with dryer numbers.
My reply: "How about shutting them ALL off - if you have a box labeled "driers" then start there, but just shut off everything you can find, you may have to refund a bit of money, but is better than the building burning down, isn't it?"
"Oh" he replied.
"BTW", I added, "do you know where the gas shutoff is?" "We have one?" he replied.
"It is with the gas meter, do you know where that is" -- this isn't quite true, you have to break the seal to use that shutoff, but if you have a fire, well....
And no, he didn't know where it was. Nor where the water shutoff was.
People can complain about me all they want, but I would KNOW where those things were. And I also would be bright enough not to open the door of a smoldering drier...
Perhaps, Ed, you should apply for a job at the laundromat. You seem to be eminently qualified.
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