Hotel Fire Presents Access Problem
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Photo by Hugh W. Brannon, Metropolitan Fire Assoc.
Photo by Capt. Joe Haynie, Atlanta Fire Bureau
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One thousand patrons were in the popular entertainment and shopping area known as Underground Atlanta when smoke was discovered there in the early morning hours last June 28. Because of the access problems of this structure and the life safety hazard, the fire department faced a difficult challenge. It took 88 fire fighters to control the fire, but fortunately there was no loss of life.
“Back in the 1920s the city just discarded this area. It was paved over and out of sight. But the original buildings, with all their hazards, are still down there.” That’s how Chief R. B. Sprayberry describes Underground Atlanta, several square blocks of the Georgia capital’s earliest settlement, now covered by modern streets.
Atlanta grew up around a railroad terminus. As the business community spread across the tracks, the grade crossings increasingly hindered trade. Sixty years ago several main streets were “roofed over” with elevated roadways spanning the entire street width between buildings.
Blocked off
But the viaducts completely concealed and blocked off the former streets below, leaving those thoroughfares isolated below the traffic. Each street thus acquired two levels: the upper or viaduct level in daily use and the lower or old level accessible at only one or two points for delivery vehicles.
What had been the second floor of each commercial building thus became the first floor. Original ground floor rooms were used only for storage or were blocked off entirely. There was a great deal of interior remodeling with false ceilings and extra partitions. As years passed, the neighborhood deteriorated.
During the 1960s, a private corporation was formed to revitalize parts of four blocks in the old lower level beneath the viaducts, opening the area up to tourism with a variety of novelty shops, night clubs and restaurants. This became today’s Underground Atlanta. At its peak about 1970, the Underground contained nearly 70 businesses. These were entirely separate from activities upstairs along the viaducts in the same buildings, which continued to decay with the upper level neighborhood.
After a few years, the Underground ceased to prosper. A number of structures along the north side of Alabama St. were removed for tracks of a new rapid transit system laid alongside the original rail line. But in 1980, 25 active businesses still remained beneath the viaducts.
Life safety concerns
During the Underground’s more successful years, the Atlanta Fire Department had become concerned about the severe life hazard there with so many occupied shops. Occupancy also increased the likelihood of fire, which could readily spread to involve two levels completely cut off from each other. So the department increased its response on the viaduct streets to four engines plus three aerials, and a double assignment was sent whenever there was reason to believe the lower level was involved too.
The only ground-level access for apparatus is via Central Ave. down to Old Loyd St. A locked gate there is normally opened for emergency vehicles, as for deliveries, by Underground security people. Clearance under the viaducts varies with the slope but generally ranges from 9 1/2 feet to 11 feet 2 inches. This allows aerials or elevating platforms to get in, though neither aerial ladders nor booms can be raised.
“However,” said Sprayberry, “We don’t pull in there with ladder trucks unless we’re in a good position to turn around. Our emphasis is on not exposing the apparatus to sudden spread of fire.”
A complete water main and hydrant system remains along the lower streets. A second, separate system was installed above when the viaducts were built. But nothing could be done about the problem of ventilating smoke and heat from under the viaducts because there were no spaces between them and the front walls of the adjacent buildings.
SCBA required
“This is the only place we have,” the Atlanta chief pointed out, “where if there’s smoke even a pump operator working his apparatus has to wear a mask. Everyone operating below the viaducts must be masked, including chief officers.”
Communication between personnel working above and below the viaducts can usually be only by radio, although at certain alleyway locations lines and ladders can be lowered to the ground from above.
These factors, plus the age of the structures—some of them dating back to shortly after Atlanta was burned during the Civil War—have made the vicinity of Alabama and Pryor Sts. one of the fire department’s two primary conflagration hazard areas. Until last year, however, no major blazes had occurred there.
According to Sprayberry, one of the reasons is that many of the underground businesses have tended to remain open most of the night. There is usually someone around to discover fire before it can get out of hand. That was the case on June 28, except that the fire broke out in concealed spaces and an alarm was not given when it was first discovered.
Employees in the Hide-A-Way Lounge at 93 Old Pryor St. had smelled smoke for some time. Eventually, the proprietor pulled away part of the ceiling to find smoke banking down from overhead. There were at least two suspended ceilings in the room, separating his premises by 18 to 24 inches from the floor of a small restaurant above at 91 Pryor St. on the viaduct level. Assuming that the smoke originated in the kitchen of that restaurant, he made his way up to the street and called in an alarm for fire in the restaurant at 2:43 a.m.
The building involved was a five-story brick structure 60 X 160 feet, with wood joists, heavy timber beams and a woodtruss roof, built as a bank in 1893. In later years, the upper floors had been converted into the Jefferson Hotel, with a number of shops on the second floor (viaduct level) along both Pryor and Alabama Sts. Employees of Underground establishments occupied many of the hotel rooms for some time. But as those firms declined, hotel occupancy fell off, and the Jefferson closed permanently in 1972.
Engines 5, 1, 4 and 6 plus Ladders 5, 1 and 4, under the command of First Battalion Chief Jack Hood, responded on the viaduct to the initial alarm. Arriving companies found smoke filling the restaurant and advanced a 2 1/2-inch hand line from Engine 4. Laddermen opened walls and floors to find extremely heavy smoke, with signs of floor weakness, but no actual fire. A woman and her two children were rescued from behind a padlocked security door in a lock-and-key shop next door.
Lines were laid to the old hotel sprinkler system. They proved useless, however, because apparent damage to the system during the hotel’s years of abandonment rendered the sprinklers inoperable.
Evacuation
Meanwhile, in the Underground below, night spots were crowded with 1000 patrons on hand for the city’s Kool Jazz Festival. Hood, recognizing the danger beneath him, sent four companies down onto Old Pryor St. to start evacuating citizens and laying lines into the building’s ground floor. Air supply and rescue units were special-called at 3:03 a.m. At 3:12, Third Battalion Chief Ken Allen was called to handle groundlevel operations.
Later he said, “When we first went down there the smoke just cut off your vision completely.”
The temperature made matters worse. Above, it was 90 degrees. Below the viaducts, trapped heat raised that higher.
“By the time we got there,” declared Sprayberry, “the fire had been burning so long it had dropped down into the rooms below, and we weren’t aware of that. It amounted to two separate fires, handled by two different responses. You couldn’t go down through the hotel directly into any of the Underground businesses, only to a vacant basement area behind them.”
More engine and ladder companies were called to assist those below where heavy fire was found above suspended ceilings and in an abandoned stairwell. Meanwhile the men above continued trying to reach the seat of the fire, which was still thought to have originated in the restaurant kitchen floor. Interior attack proceeded among the Pryor St. shops in an attempt to keep flames from spreading north throughout the building. At 3:36 Engines 16 and 10 and Ladder 16 came on a fifth alarm called by Allen to ladder the south side of the hotel from an alleyway, working lines in through second and third-floor windows behind the shops.
By this time, though, fire had burrowed into plastered walls to spread upward from floor to floor, requiring fire fighters on the viaduct level to pull out. Engines 19 and 20, with Snorkel 29, responded on a 4:11 sixth alarm to set up an aerial stream on Pryor St. plus a deluge set on the second-story roof of the exposed building west of the hotel on Alabama St. That attack was augmented by four more engines called on seventh and eighth alarms at 4:28 and 5:11 a.m.
Fire wall helped
By aiming heavy streams through upper-floor hotel windows, these units tried without success to cut off northward progress of the blaze, under the direction of Battalion Chief C. F. Rice.
“Fortunately,” pointed out Sprayberry, “there is a solid fire wall between the hotel and the buildings west of it. That helped us. We didn’t want the fire to get away down that block.”
Flames eventually involved every floor of the hotel, venting out the roof, with considerable interior collapse. But the spread downward behind the Underground businesses was quickly contained. Smoke, water and structural collapse damage was nevertheless total throughout 11 businesses six above and five below. Because of the high risk, proprietors had generally been unable to get insurance; so far none of the occupancies has been able to reopen.
Sprayberry declared the fire under control at 8:55 a.m., though overhauling continued until late the following afterrnxm. Engines 12 and 22 and Ladder 12 were brought in to assist at 12:30 p.m. Two of the 83 Fire fighters suffered minor injuries. Water usage totaled over I ½ million gallons.
Investigation later showed that the fire did not start in the upstairs restaurant kitchen, but within the lounge ceilings beneath, apparently from electrical overload. Char patterns on the second-floor joists—some 2X12s were completely burned through clearly established an upward burn direction. It was estimated the fire had begun at least an hour before the first alarm.
