Island scouts escape hotel fire….

Here’s a report from Jan & the Girls Scouts about a wild weekend in Seattle a week ago:

The girls met up with the firefighters afterwards....

Friday Harbor’s Jr. Girl Scouts Troop 183 had quite an end-of-year adventure in Seattle this past weekend–more of an adventure than they would have liked.

Saturday started out great when the Troop stopped at Vertical World in Everett for a special rock climbing session.  None of the nine, ten and eleven year old girls and four parent volunteers had tried climbing like that before, and all of the girls proudly scaled the 30 foot walls–a great confidence builder.

After dinner, it was back to the Lynnwood hotel for pool fun. The indoor pool was quite impressive with its cascading waterfall and steam room. But being full of other children and the loud waterfall it made for lots of screaming. Just as it was getting close to closing time at 10 p.m., one of the Girl Scout parents came in to join the group and notified them that the hotel was being evacuated and the fire alarm was going off.  (At least there was no sign of smoke and there were doors to the outside right next to the pool.)

After some detective work by parent Jill Urbach, the girls learned that one of the elevators was stuck–according to the talk at the time, a boy had been playing on the elevator and blew the motor, which caused some sparks and oil loss.  Shortly after that, folks were allowed to walk through a very smelly stairway to get to their rooms.  After some lobby photos with firemen, the troop headed back and was able to watch as the crews rescued the nine or so people (several children) from the glass lined elevator.  “It was like watching one of those reality rescue shows,” said Troop co-leader Jan Bollwinkel-Smith. “It appeared everyone was okay in the elevator, but it was scary.”  After about an hour, the elevator rescue was successful and there was much applause.

Unfortunately, the excitement didn’t end there. The three suites of Girl Scouts finally got to sleep around midnight and then at 1:30 a.m. the fire alarm went off again. A few minutes later, the desk clerk came on the intercom system and said it was a false alarm. Several of the girls didn’t even wake up, but the adults and a few girls had to wait for their hearts to stop beating so loudly and for the intercom system to stop buzzing before trying to sleep again.

The Troop returned on Sunday evening after a trip to the Museum of Flight where their biggest adventure that day was riding in a World War II  flight simulator.

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