Alarm Snafu Led to 7-Min. Lag in Bank Blaze Report : Delay Was Critical--Fire Chief

Seven vital minutes elapsed between the time the first alarm signaled a fire inside the First Interstate Bank tower and when fire officials received their initial report because security personnel turned off smoke alarms in the belief they were false, Los Angeles fire officials said today.

In a second fatal error, a worker was sent up to the 12th floor to investigate the alarms, officials said.

Three calls came in simultaneously last Wednesday night to firefighters from the 911 emergency number, but all were from outside the bank, Fire Chief Donald O. Manning said. Firemen responded to the scene 3 1/2 minutes later.

It is not clear, he said, when building officials finally reported the fire. But after the first alarm, a security guard apparently reset alarms, believing them to be another in a recent string of false alarms, Manning said.

Had Been Warned Earlier

Security personnel also sent maintenance engineer Alexander John Handy, 24, to investigate. Handy died in the elevator that took him to the 12th floor.

Despite the tragedy, Manning said First Interstate officials broke no fire codes or regulations. However, he said, building officials had been warned earlier this year that their emergency procedures did not identify a clear point at which fire officials should be called.

The first few minutes of a fire, Manning said, can be critical.

“We’d like to think we would have made a difference with five or 10 minutes lead time,” he said.

The First Interstate blaze spread very quickly, which is consistent with office fires, Manning said. Offices are loaded with abundant fuel--paper, plastic, wood--and no walls to retard the advance of such fires.

Cause Still Undetermined

The fire was also able to spread rapidly because of unprotected spaces between the floors and walls and possibly because maintenance workers jammed open doors to the stairwells and elevators, Manning said.

Fire officials have thus far been unable to determine what caused last week’s devastating blaze at the office tower because the extraordinary, 2,000-degree temperatures produced in the fire destroyed the necessary clues.

Manning said investigators are not ruling out arson, but he insisted that they have found no evidence that arson was a cause. “All 11 people with access to the floor have been accounted for,” he said.

Manning said the suspicion is that the fire was caused by an electrical malfunction in a bank of computers located on the southeast corner of the 12th floor of the 62-story building.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles City Council today ordered the drafting of an ordinance requiring all city-owned and privately owned high-rises above 75 feet to be retrofitted with sprinkler systems.

Fire Safety Program

Voting 10 to 1, the council also approved the preparation of a fire safety education program aimed at those people who work in the more than 500 high-rises that currently are not required to have sprinklers.

Automatic sprinklers have been required only in buildings of at least 75 feet that were constructed after July, 1974. Downtown opposition had killed previous efforts to extend the requirement to high-rises built before then.

The city-owned buildings affected by the ordinance would be Los Angeles City Hall, City Hall East, Parker Center, City Hall South and the City Hall branches in Van Nuys and San Pedro. Officials estimated that it would cost about $6 million to retrofit the city buildings.

First Interstate had been in the process of installing such a system when the fire broke out.