Fire in DTES SRO
February 5th, 2009
Today after lunch there was a fire in the building behind us. This is a classic Downtown Eastside Single Room Occupancy hotel. There is no doubt that illegal activity goes on inside, because it goes on in the alley. The usual break and entering, open drug use, fencing stolen goods, and of course prostitution. I went into the alley and pulled out my Blackberry Curve but it let me down.
It didn’t recognize my media card, so I took a few photos then shut it down, took out the battery, removed and reinserted the MicroSD card. Around this time the cops and fire department arrived so we were strongly advised to leave the alley and go back inside. Once inside I was able to take some low res video.
I had a hard time getting it off my Blackberry and onto my Mac. PocketMac SyncMaster let me down, and even Finder couldn’t see the Blackberry, but I could sync, the Disk Utility could find the media card, but Finder could not. I couldn’t get Bluetooth to work either. I put a new hard drive in my Mac a while back, but my staple Mac programs like MailSmith and SnapzPro have been giving me too much grief. MailSmith needs a new version to be released.
Video used to be harder than text
The video I took was apparently rejected by Youtube for being too long in 2009. Then I had to use iMovie which wasn’t that intuitive at the time to edit it down. I eventually got the video chopped, added the pictures, a token title and re-exported from my PowerBook. But not in time to scoop the evening news. I didn’t even scoop the DTES Enquirer, but I have better pictures and video because I was literally in the ally where the fire broke out. Raincoaster has no mention, so maybe Google will give me love. But after over 15 years this post was both not rendering well and a lot of links were busted as various attempts to cleanup the DTES have failed over the years, one was apparently called Operation Phoenix.
The embedded video had also stopped working but I indeed loaded a video of a fire in an SRO in the DTES to YouTube in 2009. It wasn’t the first or last fire in an SRO in the DTES. The video looks pretty grainy, it was apparently taken on a Blackberry, but a few months later, I got my own iPhone and cameras in mobile phones have improved considerably over the years.
No One Got Hurt
No one was hurt that came out the back or the fire escape, we all made sure of that before we did any recording, which I’m not sure is how things are done these days, everyone wants to go viral. Everyone wants Instafam, no one wants to put in twenty years of hard work.
They were accessing the damage and doing emergency repairs as I left work. Some of us do work full time so blogging has to wait until later, but Sean Orr and the rest at Beyond Robson have already posted about this, but their link didn’t work after 15+ years they probably changed their taxonomy. Sean Orr has gone on to bigger and better things as have a lot of people who made regular appearances in the DTES back in the day such as David Eby. I guess I just wasn’t political enough for the DTES but I certainly have the experience with mental health issues. Last time I was in Vancouver for UFC 289, I had a lot of time to kill as my flight was repeatedly cancelled. I walked all through the West End, False Creek and of course the DTES which has gotten worse since 2009.
Whether it is more important to be first and get the scoop or actually do your day job at a non-profit, before uploading pictures and videos to the Internet, is related to whether it is more important to be authoritative or timely online. Timeliness is gradually replacing timelessness in importance, see the rise of Twitter which I was repeatedly asked to join while working in the DTES.
Perhaps I should have tried harder to become a social media influencer back in the day, but my heart and health were not conducive to it at the time.
If you’ve scrolled all the way down here and want to leave a comment about a fire in a DTES SRO after all these years, amazingly you can still do so as spammers do not care about this topic. I keep expending effort keeping old content not only online but functioning by fixing busted JavaScript or whatever else had gone wrong with his post over the years.
This entry was originaly posted on , it was last edited on and is filed under: Rambles and tagged: DTES, Photos, Video Clip.
The story has now made Now Public. Of course they used mostly stock photos or photos from well after my video. I pointed them over here. I’m not sure if April got around to using my photos. We’ll see if commenting on a Now Public story results in some upsurge in traffic.
I’m just not greedy enough, or a big self promoter. I just upload and let Google do its thing.
Timelyness VS Timelessness
Apparently word is getting out the old fashioned way, people speaking to people, that I took some early photos of the fire with my Blackberry, possibly earlier than anyone else. I gave them to April of AHA Media to use, like I told her I’m just not greedy enough. She promised me full credit, which is more than I usually get.
This fire was the cover story in the Province. The cover photo was taken after my video or towards the end of it. That photo is credited to Les Bazso. The inside photo was taken much earlier but not before the first of my photos. It was taken to the left of me and could have been the guy with the silver camera. It is credited Randy Tait.
My coworkers told me I should have sold my photos, the problem being one, my Blackberry wasn’t working perfectly and still isn’t, I couldn’t get them on to my Mac easily and three I really was supposed to be working that afternoon, not selling photos or blogging.
My co-worker Lani missed out, she usually carries a huge Nikon camera, but I think she is on vacation. She could have got some 10 Megapixel photos not to mentioned zoomed in a lot more than I could with my Blackberry. Oh well it’ll teach her to go on Vacation and there will no doubt be another fire at an SRO in the DTES in the near future. Whether it will be 12 to 13 feet from our office I don’t know…