OK, so after all the help you people have given me I have to share this story of my CRAZY night.
My roomate and I left around 6-ish to go to Target and pick up the 50 gal. tub you all have been recommending to me. The store's a couple of miles away from our apartment, and she wanted to get some other things there too, so we ended up taking about half an hour before returning home. We live on the second floor, so as we were walking up the stairs to our front door, we both started to smell something and looked at each other. She said "Whose got the peperoni?" and I looked at her and replied "Actually, it smells to me like someone is smoking." So we get up to our door and I unlock the door and open it and what do I see? Our apartment is FULL of smoke!
I just stood there in bewilderment for a few seconds because literally it was so thick I couldn't see the other side of our living room (trust me, it's not that big). My roomate yelled at me to go inside and see what had happened so I put my enormous bin down to hold the door open, wet inside, and looked around. As soon as I looked to my left my stomach dropped: While we were gone, my heating lamp had fallen off the side of my tank and landed face down in the timothy hay lining the bottom, and worse, it was exactly over where my tortoise (his name is Max) had borrowed into. The hay was burning and black, and instantly I just knew Max was done. I couldn't bear the thought of seeing what was left of him in there, so I ran to open the windows to vent the smoke while my roomate grabbed Gus, her Pug puppy that she's had for about 4 months from his cage. I picked up the lamp, which was still on amazingly, even though the rubber clamp had melted and the entire hood was singed, so I unplugged it. The smoke was so thick though that we both just ran right back out.
After we got outside, she asked me "What about Max?" and I told her I though he was done for. She told me to go up and check just to be sure and try to put the fire out, so I ran back up the stairs and over to the tank. When I got back up the hay was still burning, so filled up a large bowl with water and dumped it on the side of the tank where the fire was. It didn't completely go out so I filled up another bowl and threw that on too, and that pretty much took care of any burning I saw. Everything looked black and I was just so scared to see what had become of Max that I got a long straining spoon and just started to poke through the charred side of the tank, moving the grass around. I couldn't seem to find the shell so I started to look as I poked. He wasn't there! At this point I was like "Where the heck is he?" So I tried poking around the rest of the tank, and low and behold I hit a shell just to the left of the fire. I uncovered the grass and found Max and picked him up to see if he was still moving and his eyes were open and alert and everything! I quickly grabbed a nearby shoebox and ran him outside and away form the smoke to examine him further. Looking at him I was amazed to see there were no burns on him at all, nothing was swollen and he seemed to be perfectly normal. Our next door neighbors brought over some fans to help vent the smoke so we waited in their apartment for a few hours, during which time I held Max for a bit and set him on my lap. It's amazing, but he actually seems to be more active now then he has been to this point so far. He walked around on their coffee table for a while and later tried to burrow into my stomach when he was sitting on my lap. When the apartment was habitable again we went back up to clean everything up, and I put together what we had left of Max's old tank habitat into the rubbermaid tub with about a bad of hay and put him in there and he walked around for a bit before burrowing himself in for the night.
All in all I lost a $100 glass tank (the glass cracked on the fire side) that I was going to take back, a clamp light, a thermometer, and a small fake plant. The bulb, although a little singed on the sides, amazing still works. Most importantly, Max made it through apparently OK (I'm calling the vet tomorrow of course just to make sure) and seems very happy so far with his new environment. I also got him a "turtle bone" to see if that will help with his calcium intake and of course you can bet I'm going to bring that up tomorrow as well. Thank all of you for helping with all of this. I'll keep you all posted on how my little superhero's doing.
