Tragedy

It's not been a great weekend here in Oslo. At least not night until Saturday. I got woken up at about 3.30 in the morning, hearing people shouting in the streets. I thought it was people on their way home drunk, making a lot of noise, so turned around and thought I'd go back to sleep. But it didn't stop, so after a couple of minutes I got up and had a look outside. I then saw some people across the street, crawling and jumping out of their window. After a few seconds, I realised the building was on fire, and several people turned up in the windows across the block of flats. There were more and more smoke coming out too.

After a couple of minutes, the fire engines turned up, and got their ladder up and helped people out from the windows on the higher levels. It was all really scary and I got pretty shaken up. Eventually there weren't any more people in the windows, they were all rescued out - I thought. I went back to bed after some time, and slept for a couple of hours. In the morning, when I watched the news, I found out six people died in the fire.

51 people were in the building, six died and another 12-13 were sent to hospital. Not much fun watching that, but I realised pretty quick that there weren't anything I could do to help. Now they're speculating whether someone started the fire deliberately. It started in the stairway, which is why people couldn't get out that way, and had to be rescued out the windows.

The picture attached, I took on Saturday afternoon after they'd closed most of the windows. But it shows how near I was. Really hope I never experience that ever again!