Workers Escape 38-Story Tower : Fire Quickly Held to 2 Floors of High-Rise

Fire broke out Monday night in law offices near the top of downtown’s 38-story Union Bank building, but firefighters were able to confine flames to small areas of two floors and put them out in less than an hour.

At least two of the 150 firefighters who responded suffered heat exhaustion and were treated by paramedics with oxygen. But no other injuries were immediately reported.

Although some in the building reported hearing explosions before the blaze broke out on the 34th floor and spread to the 35th, fire officials said the cause was undetermined.

Second High-Rise Fire

The fire in the building at 445 S. Figueroa St. was the second high-rise blaze in downtown Los Angeles in less than three months.

In May, flames ravaged five stories of the city’s tallest building, the 62-story First Interstate Bank building, just a few blocks away, and claimed the life of a 24-year-old maintenance worker who was trapped in an elevator.

The latest blaze, which broke out shortly after 8 p.m., caught some people working late.

“I felt two explosions, which I thought was an earthquake,” said Michael Turner, who was on the 35th floor when the fire erupted one floor below.

Turner told KNX radio that he was with co-workers in a law firm library when he felt the blasts.

At first, he said, he sat down. Then a colleague saw flames.

“We immediately ran to the nearest stairway,” he said. “We ran down 35 floors.”

Other workers were warned by an announcement that came over building loudspeakers in English and Spanish.

Joe de Los Santos, who was helping remove asbestos on the 21st floor, said he heard a fire alarm go off but at first thought it was a false alarm, triggered by smoke from a test performed during asbestos removal.

First Alarm

“Then I heard them hollering on the loudspeaker: ‘Everyone please evacuate the building. Down the stairs.’ I got to thinking--because this has never happened before. So we hit the stairs.”

Fire Chief Donald O. Manning said the first alarm came from the 14th floor, inside the building.

“It was a 911 call. It came in at exactly 8:23,” he said.

A total of 32 engine companies, aided by department helicopters, responded to the alarm.

The first 40 firefighters--each carrying 75 to 100 pounds of equipment--climbed all 34 floors to reach the blaze, located in the northwest corner of the building.

Firefighters arriving later took elevators to the 17th floor and walked up.

They began pouring water on the blaze about 20 minutes after the alarm was received, and the blaze was reported extinguished at 9:06 p.m. Firefighters then searched all floors above the fire, but reported finding no one.

Fire officials said there were several reasons why the fire was controlled so easily--the fast alarm time, water that was quickly available through building stand pipes and a good communications system.

Had No Sprinklers

Only two floors of the Union Bank Building--the 30th and the basement--were equipped with working sprinklers. However, the rest of the building was being retrofitted. The building, owned by Equitable Neissei Figueroa Co., was built in 1966, predating the mandatory sprinkler law passed in 1974.

The City Council on Friday passed an ordinance requiring all commercial buildings over 75 feet tall to have fire sprinklers. First Interstate was being retrofitted with sprinklers, a job that was nearly 90% completed at the time of the devastating fire. However, the building’s water stand pipes were shut off.

At the time Monday night’s blaze broke out, about 35 people were in the building. About 20 of them were workers removing asbestos from the walls of the 28th floor. They ignored the first alarm. But a few minutes later, more alarms sounded and they began removing their special protective suits required for working with the hazardous material.

“We were about an hour short of finishing our shifts,” said one worker, Bradley Franks, 19. “We had to get out of our containment suits and then run through a shower and then, believe me, I ran all the way down to the bottom floor. When we got there, the boss gave us a beer.”

Fire Battalion Chief Bob DeFeo of Battalion 11 at 7th and Bonnie Brae streets was in charge of fighting the fire.

“It took a good 20 minutes to get water on it,” he said.

Sixty firefighters were involved in extinguishing the flames, he said.

“I have no idea of the cause of the fire,” he said.

On the Scene Quickly

Fire officials said arson investigators were on the scene almost immediately. No damage estimate was immediately available.

“The hardest part was getting to it,” DeFeo said. “After that it was a normal, contained fire--at least as normal as high rises get.”

In the First Interstate fire, “an entire floor was already lost when the first alarm was sounded,” Manning said, adding that the building’s water stand pipes were shut off for sprinkler installation, which was not the case Monday night.

“Another problem in (the First) Interstate (fire) was communications between the fire floors, the lobby and outside (command officials),” DeFeo said. The cause of the First Interstate fire has not been determined.

Communications were not a problem Monday night, the battalion chief said, explaining that he obtained relatively new and powerful 800 megahertz radios, of which there are only 12 in the Los Angeles Fire Department system.

“So we had special communications available on the fire floor, in the lobby and at the command post,” DeFeo said, while proudly holding up one of the radios. “This helped tremendously. It allowed us to get firefighters and resources to the fire.”

DeFeo said the radios were were bought for the department’s hazardous materials squad “to get them off our regular (fire communications) band. . . .

“Our regular communications didn’t work worth a darn (at First Interstate and this fire). . . . Fortunately one of the first in companies (on Monday night) was the Hazmats squad from Station 4. That’s where I grabbed them. We had a straight communications line down, not like the First Interstate fire, where we had communications problems. We had a good line right in.”

DeFeo said the blaze burned two offices on the 34th floor and one and a half offices on the 35th.

Capt. Steve Ruda, who was among the first firefighters, said he ran into heavy smoke on the 34th floor and could hear the fire but could not see it.

They finally found it in a storage room that was in flames.

While other firefighters battled the blaze on the 34th, Ruda and some others hiked one more floor and checked its spread there.

Much like the scene at the earlier First Interstate fire, streets around the Union Bank building were jammed with pedestrian onlookers and the atmosphere was party-like.

Times staff writers Nikki Finke, Mark Arax, Ted Rohrlich, Amy Stevens, Chris Woodyard and Boris Yaro contributed to this article.