Blaze Evicts Atty. Gen. and State Court Staff : Fire: Three days after the Bay-Area earthquake shut down their San Francisco branches, state justice workers have been forced from their Mid-Wilshire quarters.

Only three days after the Bay-Area earthquake shut down their San Francisco branches, the state attorney general’s office and the California appellate and Supreme courts were forced out of their quarters in Los Angeles on Friday by a fire in a Mid-Wilshire high-rise.

The 12:30 a.m. blaze, which engulfed a top-floor corner of the western structure of twin-tower Paramount Plaza, damaged court records and idled hundreds of state employees indefinitely, attorney general’s spokesman Duane Peterson said.

No one was hurt in the fire, which caused an estimated $2 million in damage to the 21-story tower at 3580 Wilshire Blvd., according to Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Alan Barrios. Eleven floors of the building sustained smoke and water damage, he said.

The cause of the fire is still under investigation, Barrios said.

Peterson said the state offices store records on the top floor of the building, but only documents from the 2nd District Court of Appeal suffered damage. There has not been a full inspection to determine how many documents were lost, he said.

Lynn Holton, a spokeswoman for the state Supreme Court, said the fire would inconvenience the public rather than the Supreme Court because the high court’s Los Angeles office is used only for the filing of cases.

“The fire doesn’t really affect court operations,” she said from the court’s Sacramento offices. “But it’ll be a problem for people who need to file documents because they’ll have to wait.

“I would not think that’s a substantial problem . . . if the building is closed for one day. But if it’s closed for a long time, it could be a problem.”

The Supreme Court justices will hear cases at another location in San Francisco.

Officials of the Court of Appeal, which does hear arguments in the Los Angeles building, could not be reached for comment.

“I’m confident that no ongoing trials will be hampered,” Peterson said. “But for longer-term appeals, it remains to be seen what will happen.”

After the fire, Peterson said, about 100 of the 450 employees in his office were able to work out of offices in the adjoining tower. But he was unsure how long the small team could handle the mounting workload.

“If the dislocation is just a few days,” he said, “we won’t feel the effects much at all. . . . If it’s permanently closed and we have to relocate 350 people, that may pose a problem.”

But the Los Angeles employees were less concerned for themselves than for their colleagues in the Bay Area, he added.

“It’s going to be a burden to recover from the fire, but we can make do,” Peterson said. “Compared to what happened in San Francisco, the Los Angeles employees know that . . . our loss was negligible.”

In Tuesday’s devastating quake, the San Francisco building that houses the courts and the attorney general’s office suffered structural damage. Engineers are determining whether it can ever be safely used.

Peterson said employees from the San Francisco branch of the state Supreme Court had been expected to move into the Los Angeles office Friday.

“Now, they can’t use the offices here, either,” he said.

Paramount Plaza officials posted signs saying the damaged building will remain closed at least until Monday.

But inspectors from the Department of Building and Safety, who condemned the 21st floor of the tower, said the building could be closed much longer because of dangerous levels of asbestos within the structure.

“It’s a very serious concern to the department and to the tenants,” said Robert Picott, deputy superintendent of the department. “Our inspection people were asked to leave because of the asbestos problem in the air.”

Inspectors will not go back into the building until “there is certification that the air level is safe to breathe,” he said.