5-11 With 3 Specials And Lots Of Fire Sauce, To Go

By Sam Bakken in News on Dec 7, 2004 11:07AM

So yea, BIG fire at the LaSalle National Bank Building at 135 S. Lasalle St. last night. The "5-11 with three specials" fire (we're not sure either) started around 6:30 p.m. and wasn't completely extinguished until around midnight. We don't know what to do with that deli-order of a fire label. But it was a five-alarm fire and according to this web site a fire's label mostly refers to the amount of assistance required to extinguish it. The fire started on the 29th floor and may have spread to the 30th.

We've read that 25 to 34 people (including at least 12 firefighters) were injured, but as of 3:30 a.m. Tuseday no fatalities have been reported.

Being the hard-nosed, on-the-scene reporter you know, we headed downtown around 9:00 p.m. last night to report and, uh...take pictures. The pictures you see are two of about 90 we took. We couldn't get a good spot (Lasalle and Jackson was the best we could do), we don't have a very powerful zoom and apparently, even sober, we can't hold a camera steady to save our lives. (Where did you watch it? What did you see?)

But enough apologies, remember we did it for YOU, and back to the investigative reporting. We saw smoke. We smelled smoke. We heard sirens. We saw fire blazing out of two windows. We heard a helicopter. But mostly we saw people standing just outside the cordoned-off two-block radius craning their necks. And fire trucks. Holy shit did we see fire trucks!

Reports say that a third
of the city's fire equipment was at the scene and area suburbs lent the city 20 pieces of equipment for coverage elsewhere. On just one block we counted ten fire trucks, but we'd say there could have easily been 40 or more total. And they were all running (at least until 11:00 p.m. or so). At one point we saw a man using a fuel truck to refill a number of the idling engines. We asked a man wearing a mustache and a CFD coat why they kept these unused trucks running. Initially he said, "No reason." Then one of his colleagues quickly corrected him saying, "For the computers. There's a lot of things draining the batteries and the engine needs to run to recharge the batteries." We're not ones to criticize fire-fighting tactics since we don't know anything about fighting fires. But that's a lot of fuel and a lot of money to keep a large amount of fire trucks idling for four or more hours.

Anyway, the real story here will be how the fire department performed in light of two reports criticizing their efforts during the fire at the Cook County Administration building in October 2003. Both reports laid partial blame for the six fatalities in that fire on the department's emphasis on fighting the fire rather than search and rescue. Last night Larry Langford, the fire department's public information officer, continually mentioned that the search for people trapped in the building took precedence over anything else. The two reports also blamed a lack of automatic sprinklers and locked doors in stairwells for the fatalities. The 29th floor of the LaSalle building didn't have any sprinklers.

Right now there aren't many details on the department's performance this time around, but there will be plenty of discussion in the coming weeks. But if it matters, with no fatalities reported so far Tuesday morning, Chicagoist gives the CFD an A+.