rejectomorph | Burning

Tonight's Interweb time eater was brought to me courtesy of the Los Angeles Fire Department: behold the Los Angeles Fire Department Historical Archive, wherein can be found not only many photographs of local fires both famous and obscure (and at least one train wreck), but some spiffingly vivid prose:

"The early morning of February 28th was cold, dark and clear, possibly the coldest this winter. A very slight breeze was blowing in an easterly direction. The large volume of dense smoke seemed to hang in the air, not readily rising or dissipating. Companies coming in on the second-alarm assignment encountered smoke in the streets as far away as Sixth and Broadway. The "loom-up" was visible in some cases to companies upon leaving quarters."

It's a good sized web site, and some of the image files are multi-megabite, so it's going to take forever to get through it on dialup.