A Citizen alert caused me to miss my flight—because my house was on fire.
February 18th started as a normal Monday.
Neil V. had planned to fly to Washington, D.C. for business while his children, done with school, stayed at home with a sitter.
At the airport, as Neil was waiting at the gate, his phone vibrated with an alert. It was Citizen, an app he had downloaded at the persistent request of his sister-in-law just a few weeks earlier.
‘FIRE IN APARTMENT BUILDING’ the alert read, including a location that appeared to be on his block, where he knew his kids were.
Immediately concerned, he opened Citizen to find the full details, showing that it had grown to a 2nd alarm fire, requesting more firefighters to the scene.
Frantically, Neil called the sitter. No answer.
A Citizen user on the street had just begun broadcasting live video from outside the scene, confirming Neil’s greatest fear: the fire was in his building.
He turned around and left the gate. D.C. could wait for another day.
“I initially freaked out and started rushing back to the apartment and panicked because no one at home was answering and I saw someone live recording the incident from outside. The apartment clearly destroyed already,” Neil said.
Rushing home in a cab, he made it back to the scene to find his children safe and unharmed — thankfully they had all evacuated and escaped in time.
The reason why the sitter hasn’t answered the phone?
As everyone was making a mad dash out of the building, the phone was left inside the burning apartment.
Without a phone, the sitter had no way to contact Neil about the fire.
Citizen was the only way Neil and his wife found out about the safety of their children, and the fire that destroyed their home.
As Neil told us, without that Citizen alert, “I would have had no clue [about the fire until] whenever the sitter figured out a way to call. Basically I would have been on route to D.C. already.”
As both Neil and his wife subscribe to their neighborhood using Citizen’s ‘Community Follow’ feature, they were immediately aware of the fire and were able to be there for their children, when they needed them the most.
“Thank God they were okay physically, but psychologically my children were much better seeing Mom and Dad rush back and be there for them. God knows I would have been a wreck if I hopped off the flight and saw that my kids were in that fire.”
Citizen instantly sends safety alerts directly to your phone whenever significant crime or emergencies happen near you.
