Excitement at the old B&Z building

On Wednesday, Dec. 15, I was surprized to look out my office window to see 10 emergency vehicles, mostly fire engines, at the old B&Z building (Botany & Zoology, which is now known as Jennings Hall). The ones in the picture were able to get in between the wings. The rest of them were on both sides of the building and were blocking 12th Avenue, which I'm sure made all the drivers stuck in traffic very happy.

The contractors are working on the demolition of the 1960's era wings (the ones facing my office, and where my old laboratory was before we moved to our new building). I happened to run into the Dean of the College of Biological Sciences on my way back from a coffee run, and she told me that one of the contractors was burning through a pipe with an oxy-acetylene torch when a section of the pipe fell down onto an old wooden desk full of paper. It went up in flames and caused a big reaction from the fire department. (How many fire engines does it take to douse a desk?)

There was a lot of smoke and commotion, so I suppose it was good to have the back-up units just in case things got ugly. The funny thing is, I never heard any sirens and I didn't know all this was going on until I left my office to walk down the hall. Everyone else knew what was going on and were looking out their windows. Guess I was working too hard on Wednesday morning to have missed all the initial excitement.