Officials respond to fire at downtown L.A. homeless encampment

Officials were working Wednesday evening to extinguish a fire at a homeless encampment by the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Fire Department responded to a rubbish fire at 5:15 p.m. in the 300 block of North Main Street, according to spokesperson Nicholas Prange.

Prange said no injuries have been reported. He could not immediately provide information on the number of tents that had caught fire or the cause. No arson investigators have been assigned to the incident.

There are several dozen tents within a roughly three-block radius of the incident. Fires related to homelessness in L.A. have become more common over the last few years. In the first quarter of 2021, they occurred at a rate of 24 a day, making up 54% of all the fires the department responded to.