At work this afternoon, we heard a multitude of fire engines scrambling across town, and didn’t think much of it until one of my colleagues got an IM from a friend: “Is your building on fire?”

Rushing over to Baltimore Street, we found that several storefronts on the Block (Baltimore’s red light district) were on fire, and that our parking garage had a bird’s eye view of the whole thing. We stood on the roof and watched as every engine in the city put up a ladder and poured water onto the blaze.

Update 12/7/10: My weblog post got tweeted by Mike Lee, and retweeted by the Sun’s social media reporter, which sent a flood of traffic to my Flickr site over the past 24 hours. My boss Sean also sent a link in to the Baltimore Brew, a homespun city-focused news weblog, which linked the plume video.