I still vividly remember this night and how you could literally feel something was very, very wrong. At the time, I did the night show at a station in Sacramento & our Jingle Ball concert was the same night, about an hour away, also in a warehouse-type setting. Dillon Francis was on stage & halfway through his performance, the entire building lost power and the room felt so thick with anticipation, silent almost. For 45-ish minutes we stood there, finding the exits just in case and appreciating Dillon Francis' attempts at keeping the crowd entertained while firefighters worked to safely resume the show.
During that time, about an hour away in Oakland, the Ghost Ship fire started and the entire warehouse went up in flames almost immediately. Very few survived, and those who did told stories you could never forget even if you wanted to. Drugs, chaos, a literal maze of rooms and random artist's belongings caused so many panicked people to miss the second-story window literally inches away from them, even when one survivor recalls grabbing a girl's arm and her ripping it away from him and walking further into the room, lost in the smoke in seconds. That's all it took for her to be lost forever, and him to jump out the window to a soft bed of grass below. Sounds almost poetic when you put it like that - but ask anyone within a 50 mile radius of the fire that night. You could feel every ounce of the horror coming out of that place at the exact time it was happening, but had no idea why it felt that way until the news broke. Again, I'll never forget that night and how strong of a presence the fire & its aftermath was.
xoxo