Monday, May 4, 1998
Minor fire damages roof, injures no one
MELNITZ: Despite smoke which led to evacuation, worker had to
pull alarm
By Matt Grace
Daily Bruin Contributor
Faculty members celebrating a co-worker’s wedding outside a
building near East Melnitz, began to chant: "the roof, the roof,
the roof is on fire."
Unfortunately, it really was.
On Friday afternoon, a small fire forced everyone to evacuate
after an ignited patch of tar sent billows of smoke into an
administration building via the air conditioner.
"We were doing roof repairs, and around the heating and cooling
system compressor there was oil and it ignited," said Gail Cowling,
executive officer of facilities management
Nobody was injured and the amount of damage on the roof has yet
to be assessed. No damage was reported inside the building.
Two of the workers originally on the roof refused to comment on
the situation, saying only that it was an "accident."
After the smoke was sucked into the ventilation ducts, it filled
the entire building.
"It looked like someone physically smoking a cigarette and
blowing it out the vent," said Dale Howard, a faculty member in
Melnitz.
"It takes you a few minutes to figure out what’s going on," one
woman said. "It became unbelievably suffocating really fast."
"The alarm never went off," she said. "We had to pull it."
Workers had been testing the fire alarm that morning, but it
failed to go off.
Howard smelled smoke early in the morning, but it was not until
approximately 1:20 that he actually saw anything. He immediately
pulled the fire alarm.
The fire department arrived and began to saturate the roof with
water and clear the smoke out, floor by floor, with a series of
fans.
"It took a little while to put (the fire) out because we had to
cut through the metal and get to where the actual fire was," said
Captain Jeffrey Mills.
The fire department only had to use a relatively small amount of
water to put the fire out and the smoke was cleared in less than
two hours.
A lot of the time when workers do tar-paper operations, they use
butane torches, and it is fairly common for something like this to
happen, Mills said.
The fire also momentarily prevented several students from
turning in their applications to UCLA’s school of film and
television, which were due that day.