As it turned out, the "oil truck" was a fire truck parked nearby. The smell of heavy oil was actually due to a fire at a nearby grocery store. Odd though is the fact that the grocery store on the opposite corner had an electrical fire a couple years ago. Both of the fires were in old buildings. Not much wood is in these buildings, so they don't fall down. Steel and concrete withstand a fair amount of heat.
Old buildings here often stand empty for a long time. You can't tear them down because they are classified as buildings to be preserved, and renovating them is an expensive process. Sometimes they take the building down, block by block, with all the blocks numbered, and then they reassemble the blocks, adding mortar and more support from behind. This sounds like a fun thing to do. But I wonder if it would be easier, and not any more expensive, to just build a new building in the old style.
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