According to the radio, the fire was caused by the guy below us flicking a cigarette out his patio door. It landed on a chair, which caught fire. Some people are looking into litigation options for us even though we don’t actually want to sue. There’s plenty of righteous indignation out there on our behalf, I guess.
In any case, now that the investigation is over, the process of salvaging what’s left in the apartments can begin.
We won’t know for a couple of weeks if our hard drives survived. This is because it’s too dangerous to go into our apartment. Some construction people are setting up a support structure so that other people can get into their apartments and try to save their possessions, but we won’t be allowed to do that. It’s too unstable. So we have to wait until everyone else has gotten their stuff, and then the firemen will scrounge for whatever they can find in our apartment and the one below ours. After that, the building will be demolished.
I am really hoping that my hard drive(s) can be saved. I hold little hope for the external drive that had most of my Kyou Kara Maou on it…but you never know. The server, which was nearest to this window, had all our mp3s on it…while it would be nice to get those back, that’s not very likely either.
Meanwhile, my main hard drive had everything else: chat logs, email, photos, writing, websites. This is a huge loss not just to me, but to the people who will write about me in the future! So, as you can imagine, I’m hoping that my hard drive wasn’t completely incinerated, and that a professional recovery company can scrape at least some of the data off the platter.
(This brings to mind a quote from the Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever: “There’s only one way to hurt a man who’s lost everything. Give him back something broken.”)