Fire Damage to Health Agency High-Rise May Pass $3 Million : Blaze: Asbestos damage may keep parts of building closed for a year, department director says. Personnel face arduous task of reconstructing destroyed records.

The spectacular high-rise fire that devastated Los Angeles County’s health services headquarters appears to have caused at least $3 million in damage, officials announced Monday as they planned the long, painstaking effort to reconstruct millions of records destroyed in the blaze.

Robert Gates, health services director, said that parts of the building could remain closed for up to a year because of asbestos contamination on the sixth and seventh floors. Asbestos, used for insulation in the 1970s, was spread by water used to extinguish the blaze.

Although the building houses about 600 health administrative employees, Gates said there will be little effect on services at county hospitals and clinics. Most employees, off for the Presidents’ Day holiday, were called at home and directed to report today to other work sites.

The cause of Saturday’s fire at the downtown Department of Health Services administration building remained under investigation, although arson has been ruled out.

Firefighters said sprinklers would have limited the damage from the blaze, which gutted the seventh floor and damaged all but a few floors of the 14-story building.

The fire destroyed millions of records in the office responsible for monitoring ambulance and paramedic operations and emergency services at public and private hospitals in the county, said Virginia Price-Hastings, chief of paramedic and trauma hospital programs.

All the records were computerized, said Hastings, whose staff of 42 will be begin working today out of County-USC and Harbor-UCLA medical centers.

“It is that computer system that is now history,” she said. “So now we have to recreate it somehow, which I think we’ll be able to do. . . . We hope to go back to the hospitals and say you have to retransmit.”

Meanwhile, Supervisors Ed Edelman and Kenneth Hahn said they will propose that the county survey all its buildings to determine the cost of installing sprinklers.

A city ordinance adopted after the 1988 First Interstate fire requires sprinklers to be installed in older buildings. But it does not apply to residential, state, county and federal buildings.

Gates suggested Monday that administrative buildings would have low priority for sprinkler installation. “If we had money for sprinklers, I would spend it first in hospitals,” Gates said.

Federal officials have ordered the county to correct fire hazards at County-USC Medical Center. The county is spending $500,000 a year for a 24-hour fire watch in which employees walk the halls of the 20-story main hospital building looking for fires and potentially hazardous conditions.

But rather than spend up to $100 million to install sprinklers at County-USC, county officials want voter approval of a billion-dollar bond issue to pay for replacement of the aging hospital.