It matters if you live in Houston, saw massive video coverage of the Tuesday night "fire" on every local newscast, and mentioned it here. My point is that, yep, SOP if you're pulling a consulate or embassy. But my bet is everyone chiming in who is not in Houston learned about the fire and large first-responder reaction sometime Wednesday afternoon either simultaneous with or after they learned of the order to close. If you live in Houston, all you knew Tuesday night/Wednesday morning was the fire. In fact, when first reported and televised Tuesday night, it wasn't clear that it was only bin-burning; there was significant smoke and the first videos were ground-level and helicopter; the clearer visuals of bin-burning were taken with a cell phone by someone in an adjacent building, sent into news stations after the 10:00 p.m. reports aired, and included in later reports.03Lightningrocks wrote: ↑Thu Jul 23, 2020 9:19 amAgain, that matters not. They knew about it days before we were told by the media.Rafe wrote: ↑Thu Jul 23, 2020 7:34 am To be clear, the chronology was fire reported and Houston FD denied entrance to the consulate on Tuesday night. It wasn't until Wednesday at around noon that the news broke the U.S. had ordered the consulate closed. And late Wednesday before we learned that that Trump had issued the order Tuesday, before the fire and first-responder incident Tuesday night.
The armchair-quarterbacking posts telling us that we should all know about embassy-closure records destruction didn't start here until 31 hours after the fire and local news coverage of it, and over 12 hours after the announcement from Washington of the closure.