Firefighters Were Forced to Remain on Outside Looking In for Agonizing Hours

Like the families of coal miners trapped in a cave-in, frustrated Los Angeles firefighters could only stand by through a night and a long hot day Friday and watch as a roaring tunnel fire raged beneath the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

Forced back by temperatures that approached 2,000 degrees, the first small group of firefighters did not venture into the tunnel until early Friday afternoon, nearly 11 hours after the blaze erupted.

It was a fire that challenged and, at times, confounded fire officials.

They considered filling the 750-foot expanse with high-density foam or pumping in liquid nitrogen--materials that essentially would suffocate the flames. But each strategy had a drawback. Foam would obscure the tunnel for days and prevent a damage assessment; liquid nitrogen in the vast quantity needed could not be delivered to the scene for hours.

Fire officials finally settled on a cautious strategy. They would watch for the fire to wane, then send in small teams of firefighters armed with hoses and a light foam substance that enhances the penetrating quality of water. In the meantime, they sprayed water at the entrances to keep the flames from spreading.

But mostly, they just waited.

“The toughest thing for firefighters to do is nothing,” said Battalion Chief Lon Purcell. “But sometimes nothing is the right thing to do.”

“These are horrible fires to fight,” said Ken Evanoff, an equipment operator for the Los Angeles Fire Department. “It’s just a waiting game. You just peck away and peck away hard to get to the seat of the thing.

“You have an awful lot of people involved, but you just can’t run a bunch of people in there.”

The first of what became a force of 150 firefighters arrived at the scene just south of the Harbor Freeway about 2 a.m., summoned by Metro Rail contractors who had spotted smoke billowing from a tunnel entrance.

Gordon McLeod, a Fire Department engineer from the Boyle Heights station, was among the first to arrive. He said that at first it seemed like a routine call--a junkyard fire, perhaps.

But firefighters quickly saw that they were confronted by an unusual and tricky inferno burning in the vast subway tunnel beneath them. They also realized that they had unwittingly parked their equipment directly above the tunnel, McLeod said, and their first action was to move it to a safer location.

Metro Rail officials were alerted, and they rushed to the scene to dispense advice, including warnings to use breathing apparatus because of the moderately toxic fumes generated by plastic materials within the tunnel.

Though fire officials said the department has trained for tunnel fires, this was the first major one Los Angeles firefighters had confronted in almost 20 years, and it presented unforeseen difficulties.

“It’s not a typical fire,” McLeod said. While a burning building can be approached in a variety of ways, he said, an invisible tunnel stretching for blocks is something “you have to think about.”

What followed was a long night and day during which officials held strategy sessions and a small number of firefighters sprayed water at the tunnel openings, trying to keep the blaze from spreading.

The strategy-making was abruptly interrupted just after dawn when thick timbers lining the tunnel burned through, causing the ground above to collapse.

Now two separate fires raged, and firefighters sweated in the heat, waiting for their chance to attack the blaze.

Deputy Chief Don Anthony agonized over the decision.

“Is it worthwhile sending in a dozen firefighters that may be killed in there?” he recalled asking himself at one point. “The roof may cave in. They can get trapped in there. In a tunnel, there is only one way in and one way out.”

About 1 p.m., Anthony decided to chance it. He and 15 others prepared to enter the tunnel’s smoldering south entrance, armed with hoses, equipment and cameras to record the damage.

An hour later, the team emerged. Pale and shaken, Anthony reported what he and his men had endured.

“Our job was to go into the tunnel,” Anthony said, “to extinguish what fire was in there, get as far as we could in the tunnel and try to determine the extent of damage.”

Teams of four firefighters took turns venturing foot by foot into the tunnel, spraying down the floors to cool the temperatures. Timbers popped and crackled around them. They would jump back a few feet and then, after a short pause, press forward again.

It was slow, agonizing work. One firefighter’s feet were burned by water heated by the flames. Another collapsed in the heat and was carried out. Several others, dehydrated, struggled out under their own power and were treated with intravenous injections of fluids.

After working their way 250 feet into the 700-foot-long section of tunnel, the firefighters ran into a roadblock of collapsed dirt and were forced to turn back.

As the afternoon faded, the fire raged on below.

At nightfall a new plan emerged. No more men would be sent into the tunnel. Instead, a pipeline was readied and openings were cleared around the burning section so water and light foam could be pumped into the inferno through the night.

That way, Anthony said, “there’s less to lose.”