Hundreds Flee Fire in Shaft at Hilton Hotel

Hundreds of people were evacuated from the Los Angeles Hilton Hotel early Tuesday when a spark from a kitchen stove ignited a fire in a ventilator shaft. No injuries were reported.

About 200 guests were rousted from their top floor rooms about 3:30 a.m. by firefighters knocking on doors or by phone calls from hotel operators. Others walked outside after smelling smoke or hearing fire helicopters and sirens. Nearly all the 900 rooms in the hotel were occupied, officials said.

Assistant Fire Chief Dave Sloan said a cooking fire about 2:30 a.m. was extinguished by the hotel’s automatic carbon dioxide extinguishers, but heat from the small flame rose in the ventilator shaft and ignited residue and a filter in the rooftop fan system.

Battalion Chief Claude Creasy said 125 firefighters of 21 companies from San Pedro to the San Fernando Valley responded to the call and knocked down the fire at 4:30 a.m.

Guests, including some who fled in their nightclothes, were allowed to return to their rooms about 5:25 a.m. and were welcomed with free coffee and rolls in the lobby and hotel dining room.

Kitchen Reopens

Inspectors from the Los Angeles County Health Department approved reopening of the hotel’s first-floor kitchen late Tuesday morning after determining that no food had been contaminated by smoke or the firefighting.

Larry Kirk, hotel general manager, said the fire caused no substantial damage because it was confined to the metal ventilator shaft. No general alarm was sounded, he said, because the fire was confined and easily extinguished. Had the fire spread, he said, sprinklers would have been activated and all alarms sounded.

Evacuation was orderly and without panic, said guests who praised firefighters for their handling of the incident.

Some guests who left on their own complained, however, that they heard no alarms and could not get an answer when they tried calling hotel operators.

“Probably we shouldn’t have come down, but if you hear many people scrambling down the steps, you tend to follow,” said Jutta Kamps, who with her husband, Richard, had checked into an 11th floor room for a single “quiet night” between flights from their home in Australia to South America.

Richard Miller and Paul Tomes, businessmen from Cincinnati who also had checked in for a single night, complained that they had not been notified of the fire by the hotel.

They awakened because of jet lag--at 6:30 a.m. EDT in their own time zone--and smelled smoke. They dressed quickly, grabbed their briefcases and luggage and walked down the stairs from a 10th-floor room.

“We had the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire near our city about 10 years ago that killed 165 people, so we want out when there is a fire,” said Miller, referring to a tragic 1977 fire in Southgate, Ky.

“Our feeling is, ‘Give us the choice, don’t make it for us,’ ” said Tomes. “We started banging on doors on our way out.”

Fernando Alzamora, a Spanish tourist from Majorca, said he and his family were awakened by a helicopter outside their eighth-floor room and decided to evacuate.

“It’s like a Hollywood spectacle, like a movie,” said his wife, Lalos Zamora, in Spanish.

Not all the evacuees stood docilely in the parking lot at 8th and Figueroa streets a block south of the hotel or on the Wilshire Boulevard sidewalk on the north side.

Nona Burrell, Huntington, W. Va., sat in the lower lobby doing needlepoint.

“I felt like Madame DeFarge,” she said, drinking coffee in the main lobby before firefighters had given evacuees permission to return to their rooms. She referred to the character in Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities” who sat knitting as people were beheaded by the guillotine.

Michael Vogltanz, Chicago, told himself “to heck with standing in the cold,” got his car out of the garage with no resistance from attendants, drove a couple of blocks away and took a catnap.

Jim Coutee, Fremont, said he stood outside until he got cold and then returned to the lobby, by-passing police and security guards by telling them he had to go to the bathroom.