No! Say it isn’t so! Remember I talked about Taylor Ham, Egg & Cheese breakfast sandwiches from Jessie’s? We won’t be eating these again anytime soon. Last night Jessie’s burned.

At 4:30 a.m this morning we were rudely awakened by lots of sirens. First one volunteer whistle blew, then another further away. Then a constant stream of police sirens. It was hard to tell where they were exactly, but in my sleep-fogged brain it didn’t seem like it was close. The sirens stopped, then started all over again. Kind of like the fireworks.

Once were got up news started to filter in through the neighbors and we learned is was Jessie’s Deli that had burned.

The road in to town is closed so if I want to go to town I have to make a huge detour. And I do have to go in to pick up new meds for Sam and a few other important things. Maybe I’ll wait and see if the road gets opened back up again.

Until then, neighbor Aileen allowed me to walk down their private road to the main road. What follows are from the scene this morning at around 8:30 a.m.

It’s my understanding that most of our local volunteer fire companies are away at a convention in Cape May (poor planning!) and they had to call in companies from further away. The main road below our house was pretty much paved with fire trucks.

One neighbor said that they went in to open up this morning and smelled smoke inside the Deli. When they opened the door to the kitchen, the fire erupted.

There are no fire hydrants so they were pumping water out of nearby Monksville Reservoir into tankers. When I was there the fire was basically out in main structure but the propane tanks were still burning.

My sister and her firefighter husband just missed all the excitement by one day!

How very sad. We’ll miss you Jessie’s!

(P.S. I forgot to say that Jessie’s is just over the hill from our house.)

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Update at 3:03 p.m.

NEWSFLASH!!! I sent the first photo to the local newspaper and I just heard back from them that they are going to use it in Sunday’s edition! Woohoo! We’ll see now if they really do! Follow this link to see my photo in the online version of the paper! Here’s the link.

That is a lot of excitement early in the morning.  You captured it in pictures really well. Of course you do have a “knack” for that.    Wow…how sad you lost a good place to eat.  Hope they can recover from it soon.

Oh no!  How sad.  Hopefully they can rebuild.

Nice photos. The classes are paying off! Heard from a local EMT that I work with that they called in trucks from as far away as Little Falls.

Debra, yes quite the excitement! Thank you! They made the best breakfast sandwiches and lots of people relied on them for coffee in the morning.

C, I hope so!

Hubby, sweet, thank you!

How great that the newspaper used your photo! That fire could have had even more terrible consequences if no one had opened the restaurant…thank goodness they were there to get the building’s tenant out.

Steve, I think it’s pretty great too! After all, they must have had a lot of people sending photos in. Yes, a very good thing they had opened when they did or that poor tenant upstairs might not have gotten out. Very scary.

I think the title ‘photo journalist’ might be in your future!

C, I seriously doubt it, but it was sweet of you anyway! Thanks!