8 Feb 2007 - Much of Alvarado St, the heart of downtown Monterey, went up in flames. My car was caught at ground zero - right between the fire trucks and the flaming inferno. Pummeled with ash & debris, it nevetheless survived.

Around 2200, we were across the street at Lallapalooza when a wisp of smoke floated out of Quizno's. I grabbed my camera and snapped a couple of photos, but at that point it looked like things would be controlled pretty quickly. When we emerged from the Crown & Anchor a few hours later, Alvarado St was ablaze. Steve & I walked around until 0300 taking pictures. We talked to the Monterey Herald the next morning - they bought one of my pictures for the print edition of the newspaper and a set of 12 photos for an online slideshow. And that's how I went from amateur to professional photographer! At their request, I also provided a complete CD of the photos to the police & fire departments.

Click on http://www.montereyherald.com/ci_5434884 and scroll down to Alvarado Street fire photos, submitted by reader Andrew Kennedy, Feb. 8. Or click here to link directly to the slideshow. These links are current as of 27 April 2007.

I've also posted the photos as a set on Flickr:

www.flickr.com Big Electric Cheetah's Alvarado Fire photoset

If you would like to download the original, high-resolution versions of the same pictures, I have posted them here. Note that these pictures are very large (> 2MB each).