Updated at 6:49 p.m., Dec., 8, 2014
A seven-story apartment building under construction in downtown Los Angeles was destroyed Monday by a huge fire that damaged several three high-rise buildings and prompted hours-long freeway closures that affected scores of commuters.
The fire was so hot — the unsheathed wooden framing went up like kindling — that it melted freeway signs, and at least 160 plate glass windows were damaged in a city-owned building.
But no one was injured in the blaze, which was reported at 1:20 a.m. at the Da Vinci apartment complex at 906 N. Fremont Ave. The flames could be seen for miles, consuming an entire city block, and sent flaming scaffolding onto the Harbor (110) Freeway.
Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Ralph Terrazas said more than 250 firefighters struggled to keep the flames from spreading beyond the 1.3 million- square-foot structure, which was in the framing stage.
Damages were expected to be in the tens of millions of dollars.
The cause of the blaze was being probed by a task force that included local investigators and personnel from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Early this afternoon, authorities announced a hotline number — (213) 893-9850 — and urged tipsters to call in with any information relevant to the investigation
“When we see a fire this well developed … (we think) perhaps it was set,” LAFD Deputy Chief Joseph Castro told reporters, but added that he didn’t want to speculate further about the cause before more information is known.
Castro noted that flammable liquids are used on construction sites for equipment.
“It’s really unfair to speculate until we really get our arson investigators in there and really dissect what exactly happened,” he said.
Accelerant-sniffing dogs would be deployed as part of the investigative process. Arson investigators also planned to look at surveillance video from surrounding buildings.
Los Angeles City Councilman Jose Huizar, whose district includes the fire scene, praised the fire department for its response “to this danger. They went to it, when many of us would run from it.”
The wooden framing partially collapsed in the fire, and flames spread to a 16-story city-owned building at 221 N. Figueroa St., where three floors sustained fire damage and 14 floors had water damage, said LAFD spokesman David Ortiz. That building was closed today, and people were instructed to contact their supervisors for further instructions on reporting to work.
Three stories of the 15-story Los Angeles County Health Department building at 313 N. Figueroa St. sustained radiant heat damage, including melted blinds and broken glass, the LAFD reported. The radiant-heat damage provided a measure of how much heat the inferno at the construction site generated.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power headquarters at 111 N. Hope St. also sustained building damage due to the fire. At least 160 windows, mostly on the west side of the John Ferraro Building, were cracked as a result of the intense heat, according to the DWP. The window panels are each about 10 feet high by four feet wide.
Employees with work locations near cracked windows were relocated to allow workers to begin boarding up the damaged windows.
The DWP reported that customers calling (800) DIAL-DWP for immediate assistance with problems may experience higher than average wait times. Officials recommended using the website www.ladwp.com, visiting customer service centers, or waiting to call until tomorrow for assistance with payments, service requests or billing issues.
The threat of scaffolding and wooden frame collapse caused the fire department to ask the California Highway Patrol to issue a SigAlert shutting down the northbound 110 Freeway transition to the northbound Hollywood (101) Freeway and the southbound 101 at Alvarado Street and Union Avenue.
Traffic was a mess most of the day, with the CHP reopening the transition road from the northbound 110 to southbound 101 about 5 p.m., though some northbound freeway lanes remained closed, as did some on-ramps and the collector road that runs alongside between Third and Sixth streets.
Both directions of the 110 freeway were closed about 3 a.m. as the fire raged.
LAFD Capt. Jaime Moore said the damage could have been worse.
“When you look at the magnitude of this fire, and what we were able to save, it’s amazing, because we did have a total of three high-rises,” Moore said.
The developer of the Da Vinci apartment complex, who also built the Italianate style Orsini and Medici complexes near the four-level interchange, issued a statement thanking “the men and women of the Los Angeles Fire Department for their bravery, swift actions and effective response in putting out the fire.”
” … Though we have temporarily lost Building B, we will be opening Building A across the street at the end of January to those families looking forward to occupying their new homes,” developer Geoffrey Palmer said.
—City News Service