Fire rages in Chicago high-rise


Rescuers searching for people trapped by blaze
Monday, December 6, 2004 Posted: 11:03 PM EST (0403 GMT)


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Fire burns on the 29th floor of a 43-story building in Chicago's financial district Monday.



CHICAGO, Illinois (CNN) -- A five-alarm fire raged in a 45-story building in Chicago's downtown Loop district Monday night, trapping people inside and prompting firefighters to launch a massive fire-and-rescue operation.

Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford said 18 people were taken to area hospitals, including two firefighters who were seriously injured.

There were no immediate reports of deaths.

"The fire continues to burn. We are continuing search-and-rescue operations, going through the building right now," Langford told reporters in a late-night briefing.

He said crews were first sent to floors from which they had received 911 calls, he said.

Authorities said the fire started around 6:30 p.m. (7:30 p.m. ET) on the 29th floor of the LaSalle National Bank building. The cause of the blaze was not known Monday night.

Jim Rubens, who was working on the 36th floor, said fire crews reached his group and told them to exit down a stairwell in the smoke-filled building.

"All the floors are filled with smoke," Rubens told local reporters, his face and mustache smeared with soot. "The smoke was coming in from the vents."

He said he went down the stairwell with 12 people, with everyone trying to stay as low as possible covering their mouths: "At one point, it was almost impossible to breathe, and they just kept screaming, 'Keep going, keep going.' And everybody kept going."

He said some of his friends remained on the 35th floor.

The fire appeared to be contained to the 29th floor of the largely concrete structure, spreading horizontally across that floor but not to the floors above or below it. Video from the scene showed bright orange flames raging through at least 11 windows, which were blown out and belching smoke.

Bank employee Paul Sawyer said workers on the lower floors were told to leave about 10 minutes after the first alarms went off.

Tom Lia of the city's fire sprinkler advisory board told CNN affiliate WLS that the building was not outfitted with fire sprinklers. The building is equipped with a pump system to allow firefighters to get enough water to upper floors to fight fires, he said.

Dozens of police, fire and other emergency crews were at the scene, cordoning off the streets around the building. Some emergency personnel could be seen checking rooms in the lower floors for people who might still be inside.

The 45-story art deco building was completed in 1934, and houses bank and law offices. It was built on the site of one of the world's first skyscrapers, the Home Insurance Building, which was destroyed so the LaSalle building could be built.

The fire comes a little more than a year after a blaze on the 12th floor of the Cook County administration building, which killed six people who had been trapped in a stairwell.

An independent report found numerous problems contributed to the deaths, including a lack of automatic sprinklers and ineffective search-and-rescue operations by Chicago firefighters.

City officials put several measures in place after that fire, including setting up a rapid-ascent team to deal with high-rise blazes.

The "granddaddy" of Chicago Skyscrapers. See http://www.emporis.com/en/wm/bu/?id=117618 for info.

I sure hope everyone who was in that building at the time of the fire made it out safely. Same for the success and safety of the CFD.

There is already information about this in the Chicago Construction Thread

Here are a few more images. I pulled these of NBC 5's website.

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In the early stages there were some people trapped.
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Fire has been quelched as of 12:06am (according to the CFD). For those of you without local coverage - the fire also destroyed the 30th floor before it was finally extinguished.

Pretty crazy stuff, I happened to be walking around that area at about 6:30PM when I started hearing helicopters buzzing overhead and gradually getting closer to me. At that point I was at LaSalle and Congress. My curiosity got the best of me and I ended up with several hundred bystanders watching this thing unfold wishing there was something I could do to help. There were news cameras everywhere, I was standing right next to the CBS-2 Reporter, and there were constant people being taken away in ambulences. Sad stuff, I'm glad everyone is ok from what I hear (by OK I mean no fatal injuries)

I spent a few hours yesterday trying to get that perfect shot of the fire damage for everyone. Unfortunately, I discovered that with all the street closures, doing so from ground level proved impossible. I thought I'd go ahead and share the crap that I was able to get though.

Sorry for the quality - my camera hates low-light :)

Street closures.
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More street closures.
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Visible soot on the west facade.
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More soot, south-facade this time.
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Much of 29th and 30th floors visible - no lights, extensive damage.
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I had the opportunity to tour the 45th floor executive dining rooms this past May, including a chance to go out on the eastern terrace and take dozens of pics of the city from there. It is a fantastic building, one that I think often gets overlooked. For it's time it was very modern, it was one of the earliest buildings to incorporate flourescent lighting as the primary source of light in the lobby, in fact the fixtures tend to celebrate the flourescent lighting which at the time was still somewhat of a novelty, and very "cutting edge".

LASALLE BANK BUILDING FIRE: THE LASALLE BANK BUILDING


Landmark's design offers light, may have saved lives

By Ron Grossman and Blair Kamin
Tribune staff reporters
Published December 8, 2004

The same wedding cake, tier-upon-tier setbacks that made the office building at 135 S. LaSalle St. an Art Deco gem played another, unanticipated role Monday night: They gave firefighters a perch in the sky to contain the inferno at the skyscraper and prevent the loss of lives.

The original purpose of those tiers, or setbacks, was to bring light and air into the Loop's thicket of office buildings, a goal of city planners when the Field Building, as 135 S. LaSalle was originally called, rose amid the gloom of the Depression.

Yet on Monday night, the setbacks--a classic feature of ziggurat-shaped Art Deco skyscrapers--provided lower-level roofs from which firefighters could shoot streams of water at the fire six floors above. That tactic would have been impossible with the boxy modern shapes of other buildings notably afflicted by fire, the World Trade Center and the Cook County Administration Building.

"The stepped-back form of that era actually gave them a platform to fight the fire from, as opposed to the sleek vertical forms of today," said Scott Rappe, a Chicago architect who has studied the building and formerly worked for Graham Anderson Probst & White, the Chicago architectural firm that designed the 1934 building, an official Chicago landmark.

Watching the fire, Rappe said, "it sort of made it all the more apparent that we've been lucky that we haven't had many more fires in the century of the skyscraper's existence."

Some architectural historians would say the story of the skyscraper begins at 135 S. LaSalle.

The site was previously occupied by the nine-story Home Insurance Office Building, which is widely regarded as the first skyscraper because it was supported by an internal metal frame rather than a load-bearing wall of masonry. The Home Insurance building, designed by William Le Baron Jenney, was demolished to make way for the Field Building, which inspired superlatives (and putdowns) of its own.

Built by the estate of Marshall Field in the midst of the Depression, when building had otherwise come to a halt, the Field Building was the Loop's largest office building, containing 1 million square feet. The building, which had four 23-story wings topped by a tower to total 45 stories, filled almost an entire city block in the "Canyon of Gold," as the LaSalle Street financial district was often called. But it was called "Field's Folly" because much of its space remained unrented during the Depression.

It turned out to be the last downtown office building erected before the Prudential Building, which was completed in 1955.

Newspapers closely followed the construction of the building, partly because it was a kind of private enterprise make-work project. It provided thousands of unemployed workers with a paycheck.

"There are very few places in Chicago where the great steel riveting machines may be heard and here in the heart of LaSalle Street, where the blueness of business conditions seems to be the bluest, the greatest office building in the world is pushing skyward," gushed a newspaper reporter of the day.

Shortly before the 45-story Field Building opened in 1934, firemen responded to the sight of smoke pouring out of its roof--only to find that the cause was an optical illusion. It turned out that the boilers were being tested. The skyscraper was so tall that the building's chimney couldn't be seen from the street or adjacent structures.

"There was smoke--and how. But there wasn't any fire," a news story of the day reported.

Beneath its surface beauty--Indiana limestone exterior walls and a grand lobby that featured marble walls and streamlined metalwork--135 S. LaSalle was built to last.

Its internal cage of steel was encased in concrete to safeguard the steel, a material that will bend under intense heat. In contrast, fireproofing was sprayed onto the steel of postwar buildings such as the World Trade Center. Engineers debated whether the impact of the hijacked airplanes knocked off the heat protection, contributing to the collapse of the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

Partitions between the 135 S. LaSalle building's offices were made of a heavy-duty tile and plaster designed to slow the spread of fire, according to Robert Surman, president of Graham, Anderson, Probst & White.

"Because of the Great Fire, Chicago was always sensitive to fireproofing issues," said Tim Samuelson, cultural historian for the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs. "Fireproofing was extensively discussed and new technologies developed to protect metal."

But fire officials say they are still investigating why the fire spread so rapidly across the skyscraper's 29th floor and to the floor above.

The structure was originally outfitted with hard maple floors laid over spruce floor supports, providing material that would potentially feed the fire. In addition, some of the original partitions may have been punctured over the years when air-conditioning and other mechanical equipment was retrofitted, Surman speculated.

"The ability of the fire to jump from office to office was striking," Rappe said.

- - -

Staying safe

In a typical high-rise fire, people on the fire floor and floors just above and below it should use stairs to get at least several floors below the fire floor and wait for instructions from officials.

If door is warm to touch

- Stuff the cracks around the door with towels or cover vents to keep smoke out.

- Wait at a window and signal for help with a flashlight or by waving a sheet.

- Try to open the window at the top and bottom.

If door is not warm to touch

- Brace your body against the door; stay low to the floor and slowly open it a crack.

- If there is no smoke in the hallways, follow your building's evacuation plan.

- If you encounter smoke or flames on your way out, return to your apartment or office.

Sources: U.S. Fire Administration; National Fire Protection Association

Chicago Tribune

Copyright © 2004, Chicago Tribune

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LaSalle Bank occupies nearly 80 percent of the 1.2-million-square-foot building, according to real estate research firm CoStar Group. The bank has about 3,000 employees in the building, CoStar says.
(Tribune photo by Candice C. Cusic)
December 6, 2004

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LaSalle Bank occupies nearly 80 percent of the 1.2-million-square-foot building, according to real estate research firm CoStar Group. The bank has about 3,000 employees in the building, CoStar says.
(Tribune photo by Candice C. Cusic)
December 6, 2004

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Monday night's fire damaged the 29th and 30th floors of the LaSalle National Bank Building.
(Tribune photo by John Smierciak)
December 7, 2004

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Monday night's fire damaged the 29th and 30th floors of the LaSalle National Bank Building.
(Tribune photo by John Smierciak)
December 7, 2004

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