Crews Set Fire to Prevent Blast

Firefighters resorted to the unusual tactic Wednesday of setting a fire in a warehouse to save it from the perils of an unstable cache of dynamite found inside.

The blaze at the Van Nuys warehouse forced the closure of the nearby 405 Freeway and a Metrolink rail line for about an hour during the busy morning commute.

Four men were being held by police in connection with the 65 sticks of dangerously crystallized dynamite found in a rented storage unit inside the warehouse. The unit also contained stolen goods, police said.

Police ruled out a terrorism connection. The dynamite had been purchased by one or more of the suspects at a garage sale, said Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman Grace Brady. “We do not believe that they were going to blow up anything.”

What they had in mind for the dynamite remained unclear, she added.

Officials closed a 1 1/2 -mile stretch of the 405 Freeway, one of the Southland’s busiest, between Roscoe Boulevard and Sherman Way, from 6:10 a.m. to 7:15 a.m. as firefighters and the LAPD bomb squad prepared to torch the section of the building containing the explosives. The dynamite was too unstable to move, and it burns without exploding in a high-intensity fire, officials said.

Metrolink also temporarily stopped service on its Ventura County rail line, which passes within a block of the site in the 7900 block of Haskell Avenue. About 50 people were evacuated from the industrial area.

Firefighters were able to confine most of the fire damage to the storage unit containing the dynamite.

The incident began the previous morning when a North Hollywood man told police that a former roommate had left behind a suspicious package in a freezer. A bomb squad determined the package contained a stick of dynamite.

Police tracked down the former roommate, James Wurth, 35, of Los Angeles, who Brady said was in jail on an auto theft charge. Worth directed officers to the Haskell Avenue storage facility, according to police.

As squad cars arrived about 2:30 p.m. Tuesday, officers spotted Guy Smith, 35, of Los Angeles and Bill Brooks, 37, whose city of residence was not available, coming out of the storage unit, Brady said. Brooks surrendered, but Smith ran inside and barricaded himself for about six hours. Wurth, Smith and Brooks were booked on suspicion of possessing explosives, Brady said.

Police also arrested Arthur Chornuy, 35, of Los Angeles, a business associate of Smith, after Chornuy arrived at the warehouse Tuesday night in a stolen car, Brady said.

On Wednesday, firefighters cut holes in the roof to draw flames upward so they would not spread to other units, and doused the cache with diesel fuel before igniting the blaze that destroyed the dynamite, as well as the goods inside the storage unit.

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Times staff writer Darryl Strickland contributed to this report.