Bri in Chi said:
I've seen too many real fires to hesitate calling the FD. What you suggest wastes valuable time, in my experience. 2 minutes can make a huge difference in the outcome of a fire. The night the Bears won the Superbowl in 1985, we were celebrating and I suddenly noticed that odd yellow-orange glow outside. I looked out the front window and the 3-flat next door to that one across the street had flames shooting horizontally out a side window. I called 911. The tenants didn't, don't know why. Perhaps no phone yet - they had just moved in. Kids playing with matches in a room full of packing materials. It only took seconds. A baby died. It's not theoretical with me.
Well, I figure if it's small enough that I had to question if there was actually a fire, it wouldn't be the flame-shooting blaze you describe. And in that instance, even if it turned out to be a small fire, it'd be much quicker to just go there myself and knock on their door to alert them. Calling the FD and waiting for them to come and do the same thing would waste more time than doing it myself. (That's what they usually do at first, right? From what I've seen, Unless they see a fire, they don't just pick up the axes and tear down apartment doors. They just knock first to see if they're alright) Plus, if it wasn't a fire, I wouldn't create a spectacle of wailing sirens and fire trucks.
From my own place, when there's a flickering light, it's usually a light bulb going bad, or maybe I'm trying to have a romantic candle-lit night with the girlfriend. (Yeah, I'm cheesy).
Of course, if it was the scenario you describe in the above quote, where you saw flames and smoke, I'd call the FD without hesitation, because I'd be sure of a fire. To me anyways, just a flickering light by itself, without smoke/flames or sound seems much more likely to be one of the things above, and I'd take a second look before getting the fire department. At most, it'd be a small fire, in which case it'd be a lot quicker to alert them right away rather than calling waiting for the FD to do it. With the time save this way, we might even be able to control it or put it out before it got too large to control.
I didn't mean to belittle or anythin bad by what I had said, I just thought you were asking what we personally would've done, I didn't read the questions at the end of your post very carefully, I suppose. Sorry. In any case, you had good intentions and actually cared about your neighbors, which says something about your integrity.
Calls every ten minutes: "Is it getting fixed?" Stationed units out in the streets. Put people on roofs with binocular to look for smoke. Damn! They really cared. They pressured the County Prosecutor to go after the politically-connected steam company to fix the %^@#! leaks.
