Nothing. I'm well insured and I don't really keep many photos around. There are a few books that would be difficult to replace and a few trinkets from hollidays but really nothing that couldn't be replaced. If I had a dog he would be smart enough to extract himself, if not then I'm sure his stupidity would have been wearing on my nerves anyway. Same goes for my woman.
Portable hardrive full of music and movies, I have hundreds of CDs but they can be replaced. Have a bit of sports memorabilia I would try to save and apart from that I have a small box of stuff like a WW1 medal of my Great Grandfathers I would grab. Clothes and other shit can be bought again.
Damn, dixiebandit beat me to it. I'm not sure if I have anything really irreplaceable, but I'm also a college kid who spends his money on books. Maybe if I had time and there was nothing I could do to stop the fire I'd grab my laptop, the binder I save my better writing assignments in, and the notebooks I've kept over the years, but I think I'd focus first on stopping the fire instead of rifling through my belongings trying to find what I want to save.
My Great-grandpas sword. He was on the Generals Staff way back in the day. My 1988 American Fender Strat. An autographed vinyl Queen album. Sheer Heart Attack. All four members signed that bitch. The only three things I have that are irreplaceable.
This is right up my alley. Just over 12 months ago we lost our house to fire, which was most likely caused by dodgy wiring. While this was happening I was throwing up/passing out in my girlfriend at the time's shower after consuming far to much bourbon. Had we gone back to my place instead of hers we would both likely not be here right now, as my room was on the 2nd floor and the fire started under the stairs. Fortunately my parents and younger brother got out, though the dog was not so lucky - I found him a week later under a bed that was under the solar hot water service. As I am pretty disorganised and leave shit everywhere I was lucky in that I had a fair bit of stuff at the girlfriends, in my car and at both my workplaces, though this was mostly just clothes. My mum on the other hand had only the burnt dressing gown on her back - she lost her entire life's worth of stuff: photos, heirlooms and everything else. However, we were insured and my parents are rebuilding. While we're renting at the moment the new house should be done in the near future, though I'm going to move out on my own as it's high time I left home (i'm in grad school, which is nearby and i've just been complacent and taken the easy path staying at home). If I could go back and save just a few things they would be: -dog -Hard drives/CDs/DVD backups of all the stuff i've downloaded (read: porn and tv shows) -photos -Atari 2600 with a shit ton of games -Bigass indonesian Barong mask my dad got when he lived there Other than that I couldn't care less about everything else, it's all replaceable. In fact it's kind of like a massive spring clean. All the shit that you never got around to dealing with gets taken care of, and you get to buy new stuff. Just make sure you have insurance! Oh, and one of the only things that survived was my mum's money collection - she had it stored in the bottom of the pantry and all the cans of food collapsed around it and insulated it. There was a good few thousand in there in face value alone.
My dog is smart enough to run from fire, so that takes care of that. Laptop is crap, but has some stuff I want to keep (see: lesbian porn), so I'd grab that, whatever book I was currently reading, and then I'd get the fuck out as long as I can't put that fire out.
All of you saying your dogs are smart enough to make it out so you wouldn't worry about them, yeah you're wrong. Read the above post about the family that lost theirs. In the few fires we've had happen to clients, their pets are painfully, frequently lost. Dogs (and cats too) get freaked out, not like a normal freak out a, hide because I don't know what is happening and my humans are freaking out, freak out. Not to mention ever hear of smoke? Yeah there tends to be a lot of that in a fire and it effects them the same way it does us. I have no doubt at all my dogs, the shephard especially, would die protecting me. I will damn well make sure if at all possible they make it out with me, and not assume they are smart enough to do it themselves.
I'd probably die in the flames after one of my overfilled bookshelves falls on me and pins me to the ground. I have 6 bookshelves and atleast 500 books in them or in boxes throughout the house and garage. I'd tried to save them all.
I'd honestly leave my laptop, since the majority of my pictures are somewhere online anyway. I'd grab my jerseys that I wore throughout my college career and the few teams after that, along with my warmups from those teams. Those have more sentimental value than anything else I own, and hopefully everything else would be covered by insurance.
My kids, as I've grown strangely attached to the little punks. My backup hard drive and laptop, as others have mentioned, the photos, music, and writing on there is irreplacable.
I actually had this happen. Only it was a flood, not a fire. I came home from a week on the road and, as I stood at the door, though "Boy, something sounds... weird." Yeah, the weird was a waterfall. Apparently the idiots renovating the place above mine broke a pipe and it just... destroyed everything. The worst part? I had just moved in five weeks prior, so it was all new. Clothes? Wet, moldy and knocked off the hangers. Dishes? Would YOU use them again after being coated in the sort of sludge that comes from water disolving the sediment of 200+ years? Pictures? Ruined. Books? Some of the pages were basically mud. Everything. I promptly checked into a hotel, with two suits, four dirty shirts and five days of underwear, got ridiculously drunk and cried myself to sleep. On one hand you think "Its just stuff, it can be replaced," but on the other you remember every fucking thing attached to it. The suits you bought with your signing bonus, the ancient books your inherited from great grandparents, the personal paperwork. It's a really shitty feeling.
I was living in college dorms around the time of the Virginia Tech shootings. Some asshole seniors decided to take "inspiration" from that sad excuse of a human, play on our fears, and call in a bomb threat or two. We found out later they were trying to get out of exams. I had woken up early, dressed, and was walking on my way back to the dorms when the sirens went off. 8:00 in the morning, I sprinted through the doors of our building and woke up my roommate who was unfortunately sleeping through the entire thing. I grabbed my keys, and him. I was absolutely freaking. The police evacuated the entire campus, and many of my classmates were left walking around with nothing but their boxers on and a blanket or two. I'd thought about what I'd take if there was a fire. I'd prepared myself mentally for the moment of evacuation (because I'm weird like that). In practice though, you just taken what you can and RUN. If there was a fire, I'd like to think I'd make sure my dogs were safe. Then I'd grab my personal laptop which has two manuscripts on it, my work laptop which contains everything I've done over the past few years, some pictures that are irreplaceable and a memento/trophy I have from the hospital. In reality, if the fire was already too big to *try* to put out, I'd grab a dog under each arm, kick my fiance in the ass and both of us would haul ass for the nearest door.
To be honest, I'd run straight out of the door, everything I have is replaceable or I can learn to live without. I don't really believe it's worth risking your life for a laptop. However, that said, it would be nice if I can save these items or at least some of them; My laptop Books, all of them are replaceable, except for half a dozen, for example some are first edition books from the 1920's or given as a gift by the author to family members and other books which would be very difficult to replace. The backpack I've been using for the last four years. Photos from my childhood
A case of beer to watch the fire with and a camera to record it for posterity. All "important" shit like photos and ID and stuff have been scanned and stored on a server in my colocation, and I'm so far out in the boonies that it'd take an hour for fire to respond. I'd stand back a ways though, as it'd be a he'll of a show when the barrels of race fuel and gunpowder went off. I have awesome insurance too, so no problem there.
My gun, external hard drive and laptop. If I could go back for the beer so that way I can get drunk and ease my pain of knowing I lost nothing I cant replace. Maybe I should start a Star wars collection and a comic book collection, what am i thinking the comic books would just add fuel to the fire. But I guarantee the house would burn faster than wildfire lol.
Laptop, books, guitar, notebooks worth of writing, and cigarettes. I have nothing else of value, either sentimental or material, that I would need to grab. My pets unfortunetly haven't lived with me for months due to the shitty little studio apartment I live in, no family, no guns, no collections of any kind, nothing. I'd probably try to grab this black button up shirt I have. I "acquired" this shirt from my father about 5 years ago and it is by far my favorite article of clothing. I don't know what material it is, but fuck it's amazing. It has incredible versatility, dressy, casual, anything. So yeah. Also I'd grab any money I had laying around. Then I'd go buy a bottle of whiskey and sit smoking cigarettes playing the guitar chugging whiskey as my apartment building burned. It'd probably be one of the best times I've had in awhile, as far as I'm concerned. I'm actually praying for this to happen now.
My house burned to the ground when I was in 9th grade. My whole family was home and the fire was discovered when my father opened the door to the garage and smoke and flames poured into the kitchen. We didn't grab shit. No pictures, clothes or anything. I did my best George Costanza impression and barrelled over my little sister and her friend getting the fuck out of dodge. On the plus side, I got all new shit.
The smoke alarm hardwired in my apartment building went off one afternoon and I quickly told my boyfriend to check the hallway for secondary signs. There was greasy smoke, but not a ton of it. We paused for all of five seconds before grabbing the cat carrier and shoving our two cats inside. We also grabbed the external hard drive, our wallets and keys before getting the fuck out of the apartment. It took us all of two minutes to get out. If there had been more smoke, we would have just grabbed the cats and left. It turns out the woman above us started a grease fire while making her kid a grilled cheese. How she managed this, I have no idea, but there was no harm done thankfully. The scariest time to hear the fire alarm go off is on a research ship when you're in the middle of the N. Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from shore. That happened a few times when I was out at sea for a month and it scared the hell out of me each time. The fire drill was to drop everything, run to your room (which was 2-3 levels below the main deck down steep steel stairs, so it always took about 5 minutes to get there safely), grab the orange gumby suit in your room, get your heaviest/warmest clothes and hat, and return to the main deck for directions. It really puts things into perspective when you realize the ship's crew is your fire department and your doctors.