Main Lesson of High-Rise Fire: Sprinklers Are Vital

The blackened, rubble-strewn floors of the First Interstate Bank building had hardly cooled when Los Angeles’ top-ranking fire officials turned to the lessons they had learned from the devastating high-rise blaze.

Chief among the conclusions they have reached is that sprinklers are critical to the safety of thousands who work in about 500 high-rise buildings in Los Angeles without sprinklers, including City Hall and City Hall East, where Fire Department headquarters is located.

Fire Chief Donald O. Manning and Deputy Chief Donald F. Anthony, who directed the fight to save the downtown skyscraper, have also focused on problems with the building’s elevators and stair shafts and firefighters’ breathing gear and the successful use of helicopters.

For Manning and Anthony, the significance of the fire looms as large as does the 62-story tower on the city’s skyline.

“I think that First Interstate has just proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is not a responsible alternative but to install sprinklers in high-rise buildings,” Manning said in an interview. “We’ve got a graphic lesson here. We had a loss of life and a major economic loss.

“To ignore that fact now is to say, ‘That doesn’t count at all.’ So then you have to ask the question: ‘How many people do you have to kill before it counts? Is two too many? Is 10 too many? Is a hundred enough?’ You have to ask these questions, and when you get to that point, well, I think one is too much.”

Manning and his predecessors as fire chief have strongly backed the retrofitting of older structures 75 feet or taller--the definition of a high-rise in Los Angeles--with sprinklers. In 1974, state law mandated improved safety features in high-rises in existence at the time but required sprinklers only in new high-rises.

Until the Los Angeles City Council ordered the drafting of a sprinkler ordinance last week, however, the Fire Department’s recommendations had been snubbed, mainly because of arguments that the cost of retrofitting pre-1974 high-rises could be ruinous to property owners.

Also, fire officials had no examples to cite--because serious high-rise fires are infrequent--to show that the improved safety measures ordered for older buildings were not sufficient to protect people and property.

Despite their unspoken misgivings about the safety of high-rises without sprinklers, fire officials, nevertheless, appeared confident in interviews before the First Interstate fire that such safety steps as two means of exit from every floor, enclosed stair wells, alarm systems and elevator controls would be enough.

While the building’s managers had met all the standards, according to Manning, it still took a death-defying stand by firefighters on the 16th floor to save the tower.

“It was close,” Manning said.

With the fire has come a new sense of urgency in the Fire Department to press for sprinklers in Los Angeles’ older high-rises.

“They’re critical,” Manning said. “They really are. We have to learn, unfortunately in fires, by disasters. To me, this one is a lot like the 5.9 earthquake that we had in Whittier. It gives us an opportunity to sit up and pay attention and take corrective actions before the big one.”

Other lessons--some troubling and another heartening--for fire officials in the aftermath of the First Interstate blaze are:

- A better system of emergency elevator control must be developed.

When firefighters found the burned body of maintenance engineer Alexander J. Handy, 24, the fire’s sole fatality, in a freight elevator on the 12th floor, the key he had used to check reports of a fire on the 15th floor was still in its slot.

Manning recognizes that security guards, maintenance engineers and cleaning crews must have elevator keys to do their jobs, but he thinks those keys should not be able to override the elevator-control system once it has detected smoke and returned the cars to the ground floor.

He is confident that experts can find a way--perhaps a special key--that will only allow firefighters to override the safety system and then permit the operation of elevators, if and when they determine it is safe to do so.

- Smoke must be kept out of stair shafts.

Even before firefighters arrived at the First Interstate building about 3 1/2 minutes after receiving the alarm, there was smoke in the stair shafts, which are supposed to be smoke-free, Manning said.

“We heard from people in the building, and some of them with their faces terribly covered by (smoke), saying that they could not go into the stair shafts,” the chief said. “What happened?”

Manning speculates that doors leading to the stair shafts may have been propped open by workers in the building, or perhaps there was smoke seepage into the stairwells in some unexplained way.

He thinks a solution to the smoke problem may be to pressurize the stairwells.

“We need to find out what happened in this one, and we need to overcome that. If the only answer to all of this is to pressurize them, then I think we’re going to be asking to pressurize them,” Manning said.

He also believes that it is possible to design a system that will signal a building’s control center when a door leading to a stair shaft has been left open, so security guards can order it closed.

- The breathing apparatus used in high-rise fires must be improved.

Firefighters enduring tremendous heat and heavy smoke to battle the First Interstate fire used 400 cylinders of air. Sometimes they exhausted their supply and placed their faces close to nozzle spray to gulp cooler air carried along by the water.

In some cases, Manning said, his men found that their breathing bottles, although state-of-the-art in design, were inadequate because of the short duration of the air they contained, about 30 minutes in most cases.

“For people to hike up 20 floors and use 20 minutes of air, they have nothing left to fight the fire,” Manning said. “Not acceptable. We’re looking at equipment designed to use in tunnels.”

Filter Air

He called the system a rebreather, because it filters air already breathed and then adds oxygen to it. Rebreathers cost about $500 each and can supply air for up to four hours, but Manning said that neither he nor Anthony think of them as a panacea.

Heat is added as air is used and reused and eventually, Manning said, it becomes too hot to breathe.

“Something needs to be done in the way of a breakthrough,” he said. “The logistics of merely maintaining breathable air for people in a high-rise is almost overpowering, because you’ve got to have a constant flow of air cylinders up into the building for the firefighters to come down (to the staging area) to change and go back in.”

- Helicopters proved a success in fighting the blaze.

Since Oct. 29, 1979, when flames forced two people to jump to their deaths from an 11th-floor ledge in a fire at the downtown Bunker Hill Towers West, the Fire Department has automatically dispatched helicopters to every serious high-rise fire in the city.

According to Anthony, they proved their worth in the First Interstate fire.

Police copters, located nearby at Piper Technical Center, were circling the burning building within minutes of the alarm, rescuing five workers from the roof before going on standby while four Fire Department helicopters took over and also lifted three others to safety.

Pilots continuously circled the skyscraper, providing constant surveillance. When the fire lapped from the 13th to 14th floor, the movement was first seen and reported from a helicopter, Anthony said.

In sharp contrast to the Bunker Hill Towers West blaze, when the Fire Department was criticized for not knowing about the desperate couple waiting on a ledge, Roberto Lopez, a cleaning crew member at First Interstate, may owe his life to a copter crew.

Lopez was vacuuming an office on the 50th floor when he heard the warning that the building was on fire. He ran down 10 flights of stairs but was turned back by heavy smoke. Then, he took refuge in an office, waving curtains at a helicopter.

He was seen at the window, and for two hours, a bright light from a helicopter was trained on him until two firefighters from an airborne engine company made their way down through the smoke, found Lopez unconscious and carried him to safety.

“I really think fire helicopters were critical on this fire,” Anthony said. “And, I think that if we had had hundreds of people on the roof, they could have effected a tremendous number of rescues.”

While the two officials focused mainly on what happened at the First Interstate fire, they also thought about the problems they would have faced if it had been 20 stories higher.

By the time the first firefighters arrived--as they say, “to put the wet stuff on the red stuff” on the 12th floor--about 12 minutes had elapsed, Anthony estimated.

About 300 firefighters attacked the blaze in the prescribed manner: up the stairs to locate the fire, establish a base outside the building and a staging area two floors below the blaze, then pour enough firefighters, equipment and water into it to knock it down.

Done With Muscle

It was all done with muscle. Not a single elevator was used in the battle because of fear they were uncontrollable and dangerous.

If the fire had started on the 32nd floor, rather than the 12th, it would have taken more than half an hour to put water on the flames, using the department’s rule of thumb that it takes heavy-ladened firefighters at least a minute per floor to reach a blaze in shape to fight it.

“It compounds our problem probably fourfold,” said Anthony, a 32-year veteran who heads the Fire Department’s fire suppression and rescue bureau. “I’d say for each 10 floors . . . it quadruples your problem from a purely logistical standpoint.

“The fire has that much more lead time. It has that much more time to extend. It has that much more time to preheat. The fire is much bigger when we arrive on the scene, and it compounds our problem. I think the higher you go (to fight a fire) the more critical sprinklers become.”