The Firecracker Incident

I was awakened early this morning by a loud crashing sound.  I looked at the clock.  4:00a.m.  Fantastic.  I wondered, as any sane person would, what the heck had just happened.  Being curious, I cautiously opened the door to the hall.  I didn't see anything out of the ordinary.  No broken windows, toppled piles of junk, or burning anything.  I didn't smell anything out of the ordinary.  I didn't hear anything more.  It was weird.  A noise that loud should have left some evidence.  I went back to bed, but my over-active imagination went wild.  I slept fitfully until my alarm went off 2 hours later. 

When I got up, I noticed that something smelled bad.  It didn't smell like smoke exactly, but I couldn't quite place it.  Still slightly spooked by the night noise and not wanting to get halfway through my shower and be interrupted by the (one working) smoke alarm, I decided to investigate.  I opened the door to the hall, and was shocked by the haze drifting up by the ceiling.  It was definitely smoky/hazy in the hall.  That scared me.  My biggest fear living in this building is the fear of fire, because of our lack of working smoke alarms.  The smell was stronger in the hall, too, but it wasn't a smoky smell.  I still couldn't place it. 

I knocked on the door of the apartment next door.  Of all the people to wake up, I felt least bad about waking up John.  He said that noise had woken him up to.  He also said that the smell was reminiscent of burning rubber, which was closer than anything I could compare it to.  Because nothing seemed amiss in the hall, we figured whatever it was, was probably originating from the basement.  So, we slipped on shoes and went exploring.

(A note about construction: Most buildings/houses in this area have an "arctic entry."  It is a small room between the outside door and the door to the inside.  Some stores in the lower-48 have this type of small area between doors.  The arctic entry to our building is where the stairs are.)

As we opened the door to the arctic entry, the smell blew us away.  Whatever was burning was definitely still there.  We rounded a corner and started down the stairs when we saw it.  A spent firecracker with its insides strewn across the doorway and bottom 3 stairs.  Of course.  The loud crashing noise and weird burning rubber smell was from a firecracker that someone had lit and launched through the door of our building.  Nothing was actually burning (luckily), so the smell and smoke were just residual.

I was feeling pretty foolish about waking John up because of fireworks.  He said the firecracker actually made him jump out of bed because it was so loud.  His apartment is just on the other side of a wall.  "I thought it was Armageddon," was his exact quote.  I found out later that he hadn't gone back to sleep after having the wits scared out of him, so I didn't feel so bad after that.

When I came home from lunch, someone had swept up the firecracker guts and propped the doors open to get rid of most of the smell.  The hallway still reeks, although not as bad as it did this morning, and I'm probably never going to get the smell out of my apartment (the outside door won't open - I'm pretty sure it's blocked by ice).  Let's hope this was a one-time experience, someone's bright idea of a joke, and not a pattern of harassment akin to what drove the most recent VPSO out of town.