- Firefighters at a south side fire station are accustomed to dealing with smoke and flames, but may have averted an in-house emergency on Wednesday when their sleeping quarters were hit by some sort of projectile, possibly a bullet.
"It's just a shock to us that something like that would happen," said Nick Cook, a firefighter of seven years.
Cook said someone on the mid-morning shift spotted glass on the floor of the bunkhouse, in the 1400 block of East 67th Street of Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood. The firefighteres got busy and forgot about the glass until making a startling discovery later in the day.
"We pulled the shade. There we saw the bullet hole," said Cook. "It was right below three different bunks. Firemen could have been sitting there. The bunk room is made of different cinder block walls. A bullet could have ricocheted and hit anywhere in that entire bunk room."
No one was in the bunk room when it happened. Outside the firehouse, however, are two unmistakable marks. One goes right through the glass and into the sleeping area. Another just cracked a window.
So are they going to retrofit all the firehouses to be sniper proof? Or is the CFD going to pull out of these neighborhoods altogether and start crating "no-go" zones like exist across much of Europe, especially in France? It's one thing to risk your life saving people from fires. It's quite another to be targets for jagoffs.