smoke – Steel City Snapper photography

Photojournalism isn’t something I tend to do. It’s not that often that I’m at the scene of something interesting enough to be classified as such.

However, on this occasion, I was. I posted about the events of this day way back on the 16th August (the day I witnessed the events), and here’s a recap of the bit in question (it happened after I’d been shooting some medium format pictures around the old mills in Halifax)…

After shooting a couple of rolls of film I decided to go find a cafe and get a drink and, as I was walking through the town centre, I noticed a police car besides which an agitated looking man and woman were speaking to an officer and gesturing to the building behind them – a jewelry shop occupied the ground floor, and above were another three floors of unknown use. I heard to woman talk about a fire, and what sounded like there being a gas cylinder in the room. Within a minute smoke had begun to emerge from a first floor window. More police arrived and started to make people retreat from the scene, saying there was a danger of explosion. Some people were still approaching the scene and were told in no uncertain terms to “get back!”.

Soon a huge amount of smoke began to emerge from the windows, reeking of whatever was burning in there, for a short period reducing visibility down the entire street, and the orange glow of flickering flames could be seen behind the smoky glass. Shortly afterwards a fire-engine turned up and soon a fireman was spraying water through the first floor windows. After a few minutes of this, the smoke started to diminish and more fire-officers entered the jewelry shop on the ground floor, having to rip open a security shutter to gain access. After watching for a while longer (and having taken a few photographs) it seemed like everything was under control and I decided to move on and find the cafe I was looking for.

There’s a short video of the blaze here and a story on the fire here. Thankfully no one was hurt.