I’ve got a 6 year old’s fascination with emergency vehicles. They don’t even have to be moving, but if I some that are - lights blinking and sirens wailing - I’m having a good day. Let’s try not to think about that they are probably responding to an emergency of some kind.

Cycling home yesterday, I suddenly heard the sirens of two police cars behind me. One police car isn’t really that interesting because there’s hardly a day that I don’t see a police car, but two police cars most likely means something is going on. They raced past, going up the same road I was going and shortly after, two more, one of them unmarked, also passed me.

Not far from home, I saw the unmarked police car parked, blocking the road. Then I smelled the very distinct smell of burning plastic. Burning plastic also makes the same kind of black smoke I saw coming out of an open window of a building a bit further up the road. The outlook for emergency vehicles, blinking blue lights and sirens was quite good.

Here’s what I saw, photos, video and the works.

In spite of everything, it wasn’t really that dramatic, I think; the fire fighters worked for about 10 to 15 minutes, then the smoke cleared and they packed their stuff and left. Still, it was probably the most emergency vehicles I’ve seen at once.

A serious bummer for the people living in the apartment, which is probably completely covered in dust from the smoke, but no one was injured or I’m guessing I would have read about it in the local news paper.