VOICES-If you live in Downtown Los Angeles and were woken up after 1:30 AM this morning – and kept awake the rest of the night by the sounds of fire engines and helicopters – here is what happened.
The G. H. Palmer apartment building under construction at Fremont Street - which is next to the intersection of Figueroa, Temple and the Harbor Freeway was almost totally engulfed in flames.
And almost all the reports say this building is on the 900 block of North Fremont Street - despite it being on the 200 block of N. Fremont. It is, however, located on the 900 Block of West Temple.
Also news reports state the building is 1.3 million square feet, but the Palmer web site states that it is only 579,000 feet - and that seems to include the part of the building that is north of Temple and which appears to have not burned. Now this might just be an error - or it might also include the parking structure - or it might include an additional yet to be built phase of the project - or it might be a combination of all three.
In addition, the City of LA owned sixteen story 221 N. Figueroa building (which early stories wrongly called either 212 and 222 N. Figueroa - which would put it on the other side of the street, mislabeled it as being six rather than sixteen stories and incorrectly stated it had around 140,000 square feet rather than 300,000 square feet) had active fire on several floors and water damage due to the fire sprinklers activating on six of its floors. 313 N. Figueroa - the LA County Health Services Building - also had some radiant heat damage and papers on desks were just catching fire when the fire men entered that part of the building.
And both of the high rises might have had far worse damage but for one lucky coincidence.
The responding fire station - was only 100 yards from the edge of the fire. Below are some photos from the web.
(Brady Westwater is a writer and a longtime contributor to CityWatch. See more on this story, including photos, at http://lacowboy.blogspot.com/)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 100
Pub: Dec 12, 2014
