Paper Damaged but Not Washed Up by Fire

The brick wall in front of the Wave newspaper office wept ink Saturday. Its readers in South-Central Los Angeles who feared that they had lost a voice in the community cried tears.

Throughout the day, subscribers to the 75-year-old weekly newspaper stopped to sadly inspect the twisted remains of the printing press and facilities at West 54th Street destroyed in a $3-million fire early Saturday.

It had not been a good week for newspapers, reader Harold Russell observed. “First the Herald goes out of business. Now this.”

But the blaze that raced through the pressroom failed to deliver a knockout punch to the paper that is delivered to 283,000 homes each week between Culver City and Compton.

For the last month, the eight community editions of the Wave have been printed elsewhere as the newspaper’s owners dismantled an old press so it can be replaced with a new one.

The press that was destroyed Saturday was a backup unit used primarily to print small shoppers and commercial advertising jobs, Wave officials said.

That means next week’s editions will come out on time, newspaper operators said.

But the knot of onlookers that stood outside a police line marked by yellow tape and shook their heads at the destroyed press and the stacks of charred paper rolls did not know that.

A traffic control officer waved a Times reporter and photographer through the line toward the printing plant. “I guess you’re the last paper left now,” she called out.

Inside his smoke-damaged office next door to the destroyed pressroom, Wave Newspaper Group Publisher C.Z. Wilson was trying to assure upset readers that their local paper is secure.

“The community is very much alarmed. We’re probably the single most important paper in our service area,” Wilson said. “It looks bad from the street, but we’re not out of business.”

Pressmen had finished printing one of the commercial jobs, a magazine called Whole Life, and had gone home for the night when two workers in the newspaper’s negative-stripping department smelled smoke, company officials said.

Seventy-five firefighters controlled the fire in about an hour. But they spent another 11 hours pumping water on the 20 tons of smoldering newsprint stacked in a warehouse next to the pressroom.

The pressroom cat died in the flames, but no firefighters or newspaper employees were injured. The cause of the blaze is under investigation, Capt. Barry Hedberg of the Los Angeles City Fire Department said.

Authorities said flammable liquids used in the printing process probably fueled the fire. Ink from ruptured storage drums spilled into the ashes and seeped through the burned-out pressroom’s brick walls.

The newspaper’s editorial and business offices escaped the flames because of a fire wall, said Jovy Ablian, financial chief for the paper. He said the partially dismantled printing press--destined to be used by a newspaper in Mexico--received an undetermined amount of damage.

Ablian said the Wave once helped print the New York Times’ national edition and, for a time, printed La Opinion, a Los Angeles Spanish-language paper. La Opinion is returning the favor by printing the Wave until its new press is installed.

“People are asking what’s happening in L.A.,” Ablian said. “The Herald shut down and the Wave is on fire.”

But the fire probably won’t be the big story in Wednesday’s editions, he said. “It will be old news by then,” Ablian shrugged.