Google's London office building briefly caught on fire, and there's a very good chance you heard about it, because internet geeks are great at instantly broadcasting images of flames, globally. If only they were as good at igniting grills.

The minor fire at Google quickly turned into a real-life re-enactment of that Onion video, "Police Slog Through 40,000 Insipid Party Pics To Find Cause of Dorm Fire" (see below). Luckily, we have Twitter to sort through the pictures, along with the editors at PaidContent. Google intern Jed Christiansen tweeted that the fire started in a fifth-floor barbecue; he presumably heard this second hand since, as his picture below indicates, he was in a pub at the time. Not like the fellow who "narrowly escaped death."

In addition to copious photos, the best of which are collected below, the tweeting masses have also come up with plenty of jokes, including "Let's hope they had a good firewall" (groan!) and, our favorite, "Employees searching for a fire extinguisher found 1.4 million results."

By Google software engineer Nicholas Roard.

Via noileum on Twitter.

Roard finagles an iPhone picture while fleeing in terror. Excellent! (via PaidContent, since removed from Roard's Twitter stream.)

Google intern Christian's shot of the pub, after the fire brooke out.

Pub, part 2.

Smoky haze outside, by Berian Reed. Now that's a BBQ!

The grill is finally tamed. David Sim.

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