More than 120 firefighters with dozens of pieces of equipment fought a searing blaze Monday in an historic Uptown building, containing it to the 15th-floor apartment where it started.
The overwhelming response was illustrative of the Chicago Fire Department’s take-no-chances posture in fighting high-rise fires since a disastrous blaze killed six in the Cook County Administration Building last fall.
On what was Fire Commissioner Cortez Trotter’s 100th day in his new job, the waves of firefighters arrived, carried hoses to the building’s upper-most floor and combed stairwells to make sure no one was stranded there, Trotter said.
Since the Aquitania building at 5000 N. Marine Drive had no public address system, firefighters relied on the building manager to handle calls from residents. Firefighters evacuated some residents, while others fled themselves, Trotter said. Two firefighters suffered minor injuries.
“In the future of course, if people are in fires like this, we’d like for them to stay in place,” Trotter said. “You stay in place, we receive the phone calls, we’re going to come and get you.”
John Santoro, a vice president with Lieberman Management Services, which manages the 15-story building, said residents calling the front desk from the 12th, 14th and 15th floors were told to exit the building before firefighters arrived. There is no 13th floor. Residents on other floors were told to check their apartments and, barring signs of danger, to sit tight until firefighters arrived, he said.
Commanders quickly called in more and more personnel to tackle both the blaze and search and rescue simultaneously, ensuring “that we covered every inch of this building in a timely fashion while we still had attack teams fighting the fire,” Trotter said.
“We are committing more resources earlier to search and rescue. To do that you need more people. And more people means alarms may go up faster,” Larry Langford, Fire Department spokesman said.
The cause of the fire is under investigation, officials said.
The fire broke out around 12:50 p.m. in a 15th floor co-op apartment that resident Edward Spencer shares with his 30-year-old son, two dogs and two cats, fire officials and Spencer said.
Only the cats were home at the time, Spencer said fretfully as he sat in an adjacent park and gazed at the blackened cornice above the smoking holes where his windows used to be.
Ginger Bonneau, 41, was sitting on the ground with her feet wrapped in towels after she’d descended barefoot from her 14th-floor apartment with her dogs, Libby and Logan.
“[Firefighters] told us to stay put, and then a few minutes later the apartment started to get very smoky, and then in about five minutes it was just black,” she said.
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Edited by Patrick Olsen (polsen@tribune.com) and alBerto Trevino (atrevino@tribune.com)
