Flames Engulf L.A. High-Rise : Fire: Blaze is confined to one floor of county health services building. Damage is estimated at $1 million but no serious injuries are reported.

A spectacular midmorning fire raced through the seventh floor of a downtown Los Angeles high-rise Saturday, spewing flames and smoke through exploding windows, wreaking untold damage to county government offices, but causing no serious injuries.

More than 250 firefighters from 50 companies across Los Angeles converged on the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services administration building shortly after the blaze was reported at 10:06 a.m. The fire erupted during a respite in the morning rain and was captured live on television by helicopter camera crews reporting on the latest winter storm.

Traffic near the Civic Center and on the nearby Pasadena Freeway slowed to a near-standstill as shards of thick glass fell and thick plumes of charcoal-colored smoke clouded the downtown skyline.

Firefighters battled heat so intense that it melted their plastic headgear and even felt warm to spectators a block away. Fire officials estimated that temperatures reached up to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.

“I could feel my helmet melting, my ears starting to burn,” said Capt. Donald Austin, who led the first crew as it crawled onto the seventh floor. “If you stood up, you would be burned.”

Fire officials had not determined the cause of the fire, which started on the north side of the white concrete building at Figueroa and Temple streets. The high-rise, completed in 1971, is not equipped with fire sprinklers.

County officials said the blaze swept through the seventh-floor offices of the health department’s emergency medical services agency and facilities management branch, a crowded maze of partitioned cubicles, work stations, desktop computers and filing cabinets. Among the records destroyed were computer data on the county’s emergency trauma network, although officials said the losses will not have a direct impact on public health services.

Smoke and heat rising from the seventh floor also damaged some offices on the eighth floor, while portions of the sixth floor suffered extensive water damage, officials said. County Chief Administrative Officer Richard B. Dixon estimated damage at at least $1 million.

“We’re really lucky,” Dixon said. “It was not a patient care facility, there were no serious injuries and we have a three-day weekend to recover and clean up the mess.”

Two firefighters suffered minor injuries, one when he was struck by falling debris at the bottom of a crowded, sooty stairwell, and another from inhaling thick smoke that engulfed at least two floors of the 14-story tower. A rescue helicopter remained on standby at a helipad at City Hall East, but was not needed.

With a fire of such heat and magnitude, firefighters rotated tasks and took repeated breaks for oxygen and water. The heat also complicated the logistics of tapping into water mains and getting hoses and rested firefighters to and from the 40,000-square-foot seventh floor.

Firefighters hauled hundreds of pounds of equipment to a fifth-floor staging area, from which they attacked the blaze two stories above.

The strategy paid off: The fire was confined to the seventh floor and was contained within an hour.

“When you can stop a high-rise fire on the floor of origin and not have anyone killed or seriously injured, that is a major success,” Fire Chief Donald O. Manning said. “I am really proud of my people. They really took a beating, but they’re true professionals.”

Mayor Tom Bradley, who toured the scene, also praised the city’s firefighters, calling their response to the blaze “remarkable.”

Teams of firefighters scoured the building in search of victims, but an estimated five or six workers inside at the time of the blaze were able to escape without assistance, fire officials said. Early reports that 50 people had been inside proved false, officials said.

“It sounded like a minor earthquake,” said Anthony Hall, a data processor who narrowly escaped the inferno by running down six flights of stairs to safety. “I could feel the inside of the building rumble.”

The fierce battle to extinguish the blaze was hampered because the county building was not equipped with fire sprinklers. The 14-story building opened three years before the city began requiring sprinklers in new structures over 75 feet tall.

Manning, covered with soot after surveying the smoldering debris, told reporters that sprinklers would have prevented the inferno from reaching such spectacular proportions.

“A fire would not have burned like this in a sprinklered building,” Manning said.

A tough city sprinkler law adopted after the devastating 1988 fire at the 62-story First Interstate Bank Building required existing office towers more than 75 feet tall to install sprinkler systems within three years. Residential, state, county and federal buildings were exempted from the law, fire officials said.

Dixon, at the scene of the fire, said it has not been a financial priority to retrofit the health services building. Only a handful of county buildings, including Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center and the Fire Department command center, are outfitted with sprinklers, he said.

“The building that burned we would have liked to have sprinkled,” Dixon said. “But when you put that priority up against beds in our psychiatric hospitals and doctors and nurses, sprinklers don’t stack up as a priority.”

Ida Hernandez, a worker on the seventh floor, told the Associated Press that she smelled smoke after coming to work at 9 a.m., but thought it came from a defective copier and called a security guard to unplug it.

An hour later, the fire broke out.

“I saw the flames just pop up, so I just ran down the stairs and got the security guard,” Hernandez said.

A floor below, Hall tried to ignore annoying crackling noises coming from above his cubicle. The data processor was taking advantage of a quiet, rainy morning to catch up on backlogged assignments.

But in only minutes, crackles intensified to rumbles.

Hall, 34, felt the building vibrate. Startled, he walked to a window, where he watched cornflake-size sparks and chunks of black debris cascading from above.

“I could see some sporadic flames from the window,” Hall said. “All I could think to do was run out into the hallway.”

Hall said he did not hear any alarms and had no idea what floors above him were burning. Once in the hallway, his first impulse was to press the elevator’s down button, he said.

“I guess I wanted to see if they were working,” he said. Wisps of smoke were coming from hallway vents and cracks in the elevator doors.

“Then I thought, no way, there’s no way I’m going to get on the elevator,” he said.

He sprinted down the south stairwell, which was clear of smoke. He emerged in the lobby just as the first fire engines arrived. “I just ran out, “ he said. “Ran out as fast as I could.”

About 90 minutes after the fire was contained, the Fire Department escorted a handful of reporters to the building’s seventh and eighth floors, where the capricious nature of the inferno was evident. The seventh floor was charred and smoldering. One story above, heat and smoke had destroyed some areas, blackened others but left much intact. In the corner office of Bill Delgardo, a health department official, the windows had been blown out by the heat, and his computer monitor had melted into a lump.

Delgardo’s metal intercom system on the wall had melted too, but pictures of Delgardo and his family stood barely singed on his desk. Outside his office windows, plumes of gray smoke still curled into the air.

Also contributing to fire coverage were Times staff writers Santiago O’Donnell and Irene Wielawski.

BACKGROUND

Since 1974, the city of Los Angeles has required all new city-owned and commercial buildings taller than 75 feet to be built with fire sprinkler systems. After the fatal First Interstate Bank building fire in 1988, the City Council passed an ordinance requiring high-rise office buildings built before 1974 to install fire sprinkler systems within three years, although buildings with asbestos removal problems were given longer. Residential buildings are exempted from the law, as are county, state and federal buildings.