More than 120 firefighters with dozens of trucks fought a blaze Monday in a 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 six people died in a fire in the Cook County Administration Building last fall.
On Fire Commissioner Cortez Trotter’s 100th day on the job, waves of firefighters arrived at the Aquitania Apartments at 5000 N. Marine Drive. They carried hoses to the uppermost floor and combed stairwells to make sure no one was stranded, Trotter said.
The 82-unit building has no public address system, so firefighters relied on the building manager to handle calls from residents. Firefighters asked some residents to leave, while other residents chose to get out, Trotter said. Two firefighters received 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 of Lieberman Management Services, which manages the building, said residents who called the front desk from the 12th and 14th floors and the top floor–the 15th–were told to leave 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, remain until firefighters arrived, he said.
Commanders quickly called in more personnel to tackle the fire and to search for people and rescue them, 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,” said Larry Langford, Fire Department spokesman. “To do that, you need more people. And more people means alarms may go up faster.”
The cause was 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 in the unit at the time, Spencer, a 10-year resident, said as he sat in an adjacent park and gazed at the blackened cornice above the smoking holes where his windows used to be.
“The cats are still up there,” he said.
Spencer’s apartment was heavily damaged by fire, water, and smoke, firefighters said. The cats died, a building manager said.
Ginger Bonneau, 41, was sitting on the ground with her feet wrapped in towels after she had 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. “Then two firemen came, one in the front, one in the back, and walked all the way down” with her, she said.
Earlier Monday, a fire destroyed a vacant factory building on the Far South Side, and firefighters were still extinguishing hot spots 12 hours later.
That fire broke out shortly after 5:30 a.m. Monday. Firefighters arrived in the 10000 block of South Peoria Street to find smoke pouring from the massive brick structure, said Chief Dennis Gault, a Fire Department spokesman.
It took about three hours for 160 firefighters to extinguish the fire, which left one firefighter with a minor hand injury, Gault said.
No one was believed to have been in the building, once part of Ingersoll-Rand Co., fire officials said.
The cause was under investigation.
