By: Addie Lawrence, Editor
One of my first tasks as a Georgetown Times intern was shutting a car door.
It was my second day at the office. The police scanner hummed in the background, all static and garbled speech. The noise grew louder until it became coherent, and the words “fire…fire…” emerged,
My coworker — Max, the breaking news guy — rushed out of the office, and in my curiosity, I volunteered to go with him. We sped along Georgetown, S.C.’s back roads, following the commands of the police scanner and chasing the sound of sirens. We reached the end of the road and spotted smoke billowing into the sky.
We’d found our fire.
We parked, Max threw me a safety vest, and we ran down the short stretch of the road to the burning house. Concerned neighbors lingered in their yards. The smoke, a heavy brown, plumed from holes in the ceiling.
I pulled out my notebook, ready to observe and take notes, when Max realized he’d left his car door wide open. And it was — the door flung to the sided in urgency. So, my first official task at the scene was to rush 100 yards back and shut the dang door.
Jogging back in business casual attire was challenging, especially during a fire in the summer heat. My bag — over-sized and stuffed with notebooks, my camera and receipts from 2012 — slammed against my thighs.
When I returned and the initial rush died down, the process felt surprisingly routine. Max took photos of the fire and conducted quick interviews with the fire chief, getting the essential but simplistic details. The smoke continued to pour out of the ceiling, but over time, it lightened, and the firefighters took off their jackets in the front yard.
The story was sealed when a firefighter emerged from the house with an unharmed dog — everyone inside had escaped.
There are certain things I didn’t expected — the way the smoke sticks to the inside of your throat, how banal it feels to swipe mosquitoes off of your ankles while a house burns in the background, and the sensation of intrusion on the intimate moments of neighbors hugging or the imagined grief of the homeowner.
It happened so quickly. Max and I returned to the office. He wrote a quick story to be published that afternoon and in the next day’s paper. I smelled like smoke for the rest of the day.
