Have you ever come home to find a fire crew, the police, or an ambulance at your house?

I’ve been finding them in front of the house quite regularly lately. One of our neighbours is quite ill and her husband has been calling 911. The spot in front of our house is as close as they can get to J and G some days. Very few houses around here have parking so EMS has to pull up wherever they can. We’re on a one-way block so they’re facing the wrong way if they came from our closest ambulance station.

It’s unnerving but not as heart-thumping as it was a year or so ago.

They were all here an hour ago.

I don’t envy them taking the gurney (and J) down the stairs from the house to the street. At least there’s a stairlift down from the bedroom to their main floor .

Well… sort of.

One time about thirty-some years ago I was driving home from work when I heard the siren wail of an ambulance coming up from behind. So I dutifully pulled to the side of the road to let it pass… and then followed it turn by turn to my house. I hadn’t had any idea where it was going, and by the time it passed me we were only a mile or so and a couple of turns from my house, so it wasn’t going exceptionally fast. But I recall the thoughts that were building as I followed… and it took both of “my” turns just before I did, and ended parked in front of my house.

My wife was home at the time with our two pre-school kids, and my heart was in my mouth as I parked on the road behind the ambulance and ran up to the house.

They were there for one of the toddlers on the other side of the road. Apparently the kids had been playing in our yard, and the neighbor kid had to go home, so he just ran across the road, as kids will sometimes do before anyone can stop them. Again, since it was a purely residential area and not an arterial road (and we lived on the corner, where people were either slowing to stop at the intersection or still going slow from having taken the corner into the neighborhood), there wasn’t actually a car hitting a child, but the kid hit the pavement, anyway, and got pretty bloody.

The EMTs just bandaged him up, and he wasn’t even taken to the hospital, so… not a huge deal, but still pretty frightening. To his credit, the driver of the car who had “almost” hit the child stayed right there at the scene through the whole process, even when the cops came and told him that since he’d done nothing wrong there was no need for him to stay. Frankly, I don’t think he was even capable of driving for that whole hour or so.

I was living overseas in a very nice apartment. One of my kids accidentally left the hot water water running in the bathroom before we left for a day trip. The tankless, natural gas fired, instant water heater was running constantly to keep the water hot. That set off a gas leak alarm which then automatically called the fire department.
We returned home to a small mess and obvious intrusion.

I’ve got another one, but not from my own life here.

Some backstory: I started life as the first born in a family of five kids. After my brother was born, the last of us, my parents decided that a three-bedroom home with single bath just wasn’t going to do it, so when I was ten years old we moved to a larger house in another town just five miles away.

Fast forward to my kids being nearly the same age as I was when we moved… and they were visiting their grandparents (my folks) in the house we had moved to all those years ago. It was the first time that they heard that it wasn’t “my first house”, so during the week that they were visiting there, Dad packed them into the car and took them for a ride… to our old house, just because they were curious. They never got out of the car, just parked in the road in front of the house and looked around while Dad pointed out the sights and so forth. Then he pulled into the driveway of the house to turn around, and drove home. It was probably less than a half-hour from door-to-door.

Before they even got out of the car at their own home, the hometown police were pulling up behind them in the driveway to question them about what had seemed to the folks in the old neighborhood to be somebody casing the place. (So someone had called in the license plate to the local cops, who had run the tag and called the next town’s police to request a follow-up… pretty good and responsive police work, actually.)

Dad and the cops had a good laugh to realize what was going on, and that, no, the 70-year old they were talking to with a couple of kids in the car with him wasn’t casing a place that they planned to rob, just visiting the old neighborhood where no one knew them any more.

I was only a year old and have no memory of it. But my sister was born on Friday the 13th, and the next day the four of us came home from the hospital to find the house burning down. When I was 5 and my sister 4, dad would drive us past an ugly cinder block apartment building erected in place of our old house and wax on about the former glories of the place.

One time. I was robbed and when I came home my roommate had already called the police. Black fingerprint dust all over everything. My CD’s were stolen, and the jewelry I had left on my nightstand, and some other jewelry too.

Not my story, but someone I knew years ago built a brand new house outside of San Francisco. She finally moved in, and the second day there she turned on her dishwasher, and left to run some errands. She returned home to firemen dousing her cindered house. There was some sort of short, or bad wiring, to the dishwasher.

Oh yeah. I’ve lived in some rough places. It wasn’t uncommon to see all sorts of emergency vehicles at all hours of the day.
I was walking my dog one morning in my old apartment, just locking my door to go for a few minutes when something caught my peripheral vision. Three doors to my right was a SWAT team in full gear. I froze, hoping they wouldn’t shoot me. One guy waived me back, so I went back in my door and told Wanda (my dog) that she would have to wait. The SWAT team left after arresting like 5 of,my neighbors. Apparently they were cooking meth…

My next door neighbor was murdered one night, in a different place. I went to the kitchen to get a beer, and there were cops everywhere on the side of my house. I could see them out the window. They had been there for like an hour, but I didn’t notice.

Been robbed too. But no cops involved. What’s the point, when it’ll just happen again…

My daughter ran to me from her room one night and told me police were in the back yard. I looked out the window. There were SWAT creeping around all over.
I didn’t know those people next door, and didn’t get much chance. They moved out soon after.

Yes, when my wife’s sister was living with us. A nurse would come by during the day, check her numbers from a blood test, freak out, and call an ambulance. This happened several times while she was with us.
She was finally moved to a board and care facility. She lived there about 2 months, then lived with her mom for a couple weeks, where she died.

This happened about several years ago, when my wife’s brother, his wife and their five kids stopped by for a visit that unexpectedly lasted almost 3 months.

It was about 5 PM, I had been out, and came back to the house to find the front door wide open, and SIL and kids in the back yard hanging laundry. Fortunately, the dog had not walked out the front door to visit the neighborhood, as she was known to do.

I put her leash on, and without saying anything to anyone, I went back out, closing the front door, walking the dog to the neighborhood park.

There is a stream that runs in a ravine along the street going to the park, and then the stream goes through the park. When we finally headed back to the house, I noticed an unusual police presence along the ravine. My first guess was that there might be a child missing. I asked one officer if there was anything I could do. At first he said, no, that the police had everything was under control. He went on to tell me they were looking for a runner from a home entry and auto theft that had happened a few blocks away. He then asked where I lived. I told him I was on the next block away, in the opposite direction. He then gave me a description of the suspect, and said to call 911 if I happened to see him.

I then took the dog home, and while getting her some fresh water, I noticed SIL and the kids in the backyard talking to someone who fit the officers description! Needles to say, I went out to investigate.

She said to me, “This is Jason. He just came up between the shed and the fence, and I thought he might need some help.”
Jason then seemed a little nervous. “I was just leaving. I’m not taking anything, I’m just leaving!”
I said, “Jason, do you know the police are looking for you?”
“Yeah,’ he said. “It’s all a misunderstanding. They think I hit my girlfriend while we were arguing, but actually she hit me.”
“Well,” I replied, “If what you say is true, I’d suggest talking to them and getting it all straightened out.”
He then pleaded, “Don’t call them, please! I’ll go and you’ll never see me again!”
“If you promise to talk them, I won’t call,” I stated.
“I promise! I promise!Thank you!” he shouted, as he exited the gate. I immediately went in to the house and called 911, because I could tell he was running, not going to turn himself in.

Within 5 minutes, the street was crawling with police cruisers, SUV’s and about 3 or 4 udercover vehicles. I saw the officer I had talked to earlier. He took my statement, and by the time we were finished (about 4 or 5 minutes} he got the call that the suspect had been apprehended. He turned to me, shook my hand and said, “Thank you very much!”

Not police, fire or ambulance, but, I did arrive home just in time to see a bush fire roar through the nature reserve that runs along the back of my house. The firies did attend.

Yes. The building next door had a meth lab in it and it had exploded quite spectacularly. Had police, fire and ambulances there sorting the mess out.

When I was a kid I came back to the house one day to see an ambulance parked outside. It had come to take my younger brother to hospital. They weren’t sure what was wrong with him but eventually decided it was polio. He made a full recovery.

Not exactly, cops rang our doorbell at 4am one time though. Sister had bumped a car in a parking lot without realizing it and left the scene so they were calling it a hit and run. Came to our house at 4am and described her car and said she’d been “involved in a hit and run” which was about the dumbest way to phrase that because it made us all think she was dead.

Came back to the dorm to find an ambulance at it a few times, definitely not the same heart-stopping moment as if you live in a single family home though.

When I was ten I came home from school one day in time to see my grandfather being taken out of the house on a stretcher, He’d had a heart attack. I was pretty scared. That wasn’t his last one, though.

A couple of years ago my husband and I came home from a Friday-night event to find a fire truck in front of our house and a crew in the driveway. Some weird combination of stuff my son had collected had spontaneously combusted, and a neighbor called the fire department. My son had extinguished the fire before the firefighters arrived, but it was awfully close to our house and the neighbor’s, and it gave us all a fright.

We’ve seen cops and ambulances come into our neighborhood a number of times in recent years, including for a murder, but coming home to find an emergency team already at your house is especially disturbing.

Woke up today to local police calling my name.
My ride to medical appointments got her fridays mixed up. When she couldn’t raise me from sleep this morning she got worried and called police to let her in!
That was an effed up wake up, but at least comforting to know if there was a real issue, she doesn’t just walk away.
Made a cute dream take a shocking turn.

I was just reminded of another. I lived in a townhouse, I was a young girl, maybe 11, and there was all sorts of emergency vehicles in front. It wasn’t for my house, it was for my neighbor. Her teenage son had shot himself. The whole block was pretty rocked by that event. Nice woman, very sad.

I came home one day to find the cops had arrested some people down the street who had a meth lab. A news crew had been interviewing people out in front of my house, directly in front of my driveway. That night I got to see the report, my house, and my empty carport. A beautiful shot!