Firefighters will tell you that seconds count when it comes to getting out alive from a fire. This morning fire broke out in an apartment building at 6070 Cates in west St. Louis. The owner of the building and the residents we talked with said that the smoke detector goes off so frequently that when the alarm sounded this morning their first reaction was that it was a false alarm. So you can imagine they didn't move with much haste.

It didn't take long for thick, black smoke to fill the hallways. One woman died. One man suffered third degree burns when he tried to escape from the building. One woman jumped from a third floor window. A neighbor told me the woman broke her neck and tonight she's in critical condition.

When I was going to school at Mizzou I lived in an apartment building next to the Heidleberg restaurant. It was just across the street from the journalism school. If you went to Mizzou you probably know exactly which building I'm talking about. One night I came home from the library and walked into the building. A guy was yelling from the basement that the dryer was on fire. A few wisps of smoke were starting to make their way up the stairwell from the basement. I lived on the second floor. I walked up to my apartment and alerted my roommates. By the time we started walking out of the building the smoke was in our kitchen. It was really not much smoke to speak of, but I was already starting to have trouble breathing. I was struck by how quickly conditions can change. If the smoke was thicker or if we had had difficulty getting out of the building it could have been disastrous.

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