Free dinner for some

My mind was soaring and I was about to doze off last night, when I heard some kind of uproar somewhere outside my room. I thought I was dreaming but the noise was getting louder and it appeared coming from our kitchen. Shit…I hate that feeling, you know the shit-scared-but-yet-you-have-to-find-out-what’s-that-all-about kinda feeling. I got out from the bed to find out

Phew…it came from the building just behind our apartment. So I went and opened the window, and there … the restaurant on the ground floor of that building was on blaze. There were like trillions people crowding the place, struggling to put off the fire, dragging hose from nearby building, splashing water and spraying with extinguishers. O'boy..it was a big fire as I could sense the heat from my window. I was thinking about my kids and important document that I need to clutch just in case it spread to our building. Things were fucking chaotic with the hollering and outcry, people were everywhere, some were actually did something and some were mere bystanders. A view from my apartment was like a first class seat, so I kinda saw all in action.

I woke missus up just in case. I was wondering and speculting how long would the Fire Fighting team take to be there. Man, the blaze was flaming higher with more water splashing on it, as if you were spattering gasoline to it. It was quite frightening just to look at how the fire was getting bigger and bigger, dark smoke coming out from the building and shit. Not until half an hour later, the fire squad came and put out the fire for good.

That brings me to ponder about our HSE or all these Fire Evacuation manuals and policy that I bet we all have at our work place. I am sure they're all written perfectly with detailed procedure and process stipulated therein. But in reality, when real shit happens, rarely things are going as per plan. We are all subject to instantaneous reaction to things, despite what we have theoretically learned. That was what actually happened last night. All acts were spontaneous. There were no systematic evacuation process, nobody come to alert other tenants of the building, patrons running outta restaurant in total chaos, people crowding the place instead of assembling at a safer place and all the havoc (that was what I observed from my first class seat).

p/s I'm just wondering how many patrons were actually spontaneously reacting to the incident by just leaving the restaurant with free dinner.