GREENCOUNTYPETE reminds me of a tragedy we had here about 30-40 years ago. There was a structure fire on a 2 story wood frame construction warehouse. Fire was fairly well involved and multiple teams were attacking from different fronts. One team was on the ground floor when the building collapsed on them killing 2 firefighters. Cause of the collapse was several piles of fur that had gotten soaked and became too heavy for the load rating of the wood frame.
Many things were learned from this and our fire dept has not been the same since. There are 2 firehouses now named after these heroes in my city. Every year on their anniversary of their sacrifices we remember them.
Butch Melody and John Halas , you are not forgotten.
this was the construction and plumbing business I worked for 25 years ago.
I had done the majority of the electrical work for the previous 2 years on the building , I got to work with the fire inspector for 2 days digging up boxes and reconstructing the electrical system.
one of the first questions the fire inspector asked was were there any clocks with metal hands I could think of one , the boss/owner was into flying he had a Gulf Aviation fuels clock in the office up stairs metal sided wood frame pole building with offices up stairs. he was particularity interested when I told him it was neon around the outside. well we did find that clock hands stopped at about 4:20 am it was ruled the cause of the fire. Neon has a way of catastrophically failing when it burns out. the fire was not noticed till almost 6 am when it had hit the paint cans down stairs and they woke the boss who lived about 100 yards away.
sent a lot of firemen to the hospital , PVC when burned is bad stuff cyanide poisoning , when your a plumbing outfit we had a whole wall just for pvc fittings and racks of pipe outside against the building.
most of the filing cabinets actually held together but they fell on racks of shelving below the couple that had a strait fall and hit the concrete busted open