86 More Fire Calls for Bank Tower

Since the devastating First Interstate Bank fire in early May, firefighters have raced to the downtown Los Angeles tower 86 times for various reasons, including two small blazes that were deliberately set, a fire official said Tuesday.

Both arson fires--one started July 19 in a small closet on the 57th floor and the other set May 16 in a small room in a below-ground parking level--were detected and put out quickly by building employees, Fire Inspector Ed Reed said. Damage was minor in both instances.

No one saw who set the fires and arson investigators do not have suspects, Reed said. Without more to go on, he said, it is “difficult to come up with a pattern.” There has been no noticeable increase in arson fires in other downtown high-rises, he said.

After fire ravaged several floors of the 62-story First Interstate building on May 4 and claimed the life of a 24-year-old maintenance worker trapped in an elevator, a special team of federal arson investigators exhaustively probed the fire-blackened debris and decided that it had been caused accidentally, although intensely hot flames had wiped out most of the evidence.

Restoration work is still under way at the site.

Construction is one of the reasons the Fire Department has received calls to come to First Interstate, Reed said. People in other buildings in the area have been so sensitized to the possibility of fire they have sometime mistaken dust for smoke and summoned firefighters, he said.

Most of the 86 calls between May 4 and July 29 were what Reed called “accidental false alarms,” as opposed to “malicious” false alarms. He also said that some of the calls have been generated by work on First Interstate’s fire-alarm and sprinkler systems.

About 400 workers were evacuated from the building May 16 when a small electrical motor started smoldering on the 22nd floor, according to Assistant Fire Chief David Sloan.

About 100 firefighters responded to the alarm, but the overheated motor, which powers an air-conditioning system in an elevator room, had started to cool by the time they reached it, Sloan said.