Journal-Sentinal

A MAJOR FIRE AT THE PATRICK CUDAHY specialty meat packing plant just south of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has just now been brought under control after burning all night.

WLUK-TV has some early fire video:

The fire began before 10 pm Sunday night when there were very few workers in the massive plant.  The work floors are sprinklered, but the fire began in the crawl space between the ceiling and the roof, spreading unabated.

photo by Hubert Bartosz

The fire brought a 5-alarm response to the facility which has some structures dating back 128 years.  While the FF’s were attempting to get to the blaze, the roof collapsed and destroyed the integrity of the sprinkler system.

WTMJ-TV has more:

The responding fire departments worked all through Sunday night and are still on the scene at noon on Monday.  A release of ammonia gas into the atmosphere coupled with a fear of penetration into the ammonia tank storage area demanded a large evacuation of the surrounding urban neighborhood.  The Cudahy Police also called for mutual-aid assistence bringing in 40 peace officers from around southern Wisconsin to aid in the evacuation and area security.  Eventually the evacuation zone was at a 1-mile radius.

photo by Roman Zukowski

WTMJ-TV has extensive video coverge of the evacuation:

While the extent of fire damage was largely limited to the roof area, there apparently has been considerable smoke and water ancillary damage to the plant.

The operations are still ongoing and there is no word about what caused the fire yet.  We will update this report when more information is released.

Sourced from several news and tv reports.

UPDATE, Tuesday morning:  The fire is expected to burn until Wednesday.  See the complete Firegeezer updated report HERE.

EVERY FIRE COMPANY OF THE SPRINGFIELD, MASSACHUSETTS, Fire Department was on the scene early Monday morning when fire started spreading in a block of multi-family homes.

The alarm was first sounded shortly after 11 pm Sunday night when neighbors spotted a vacant house on fire.  When the 1st units arrived the building was fully involved and starting to spread to a neighboring 3-decker that was occupied.

WWLP-TV Ch. 22 has the video report:

As the firefighters were doing a full search of the occupied building, the District Chief in command sensed that the building was becoming unstable and ordered an evacuation.  A mere 30 seconds after the last FF got out, the building collapsed.  “It came down, not in pieces, but all at once,” he said.

Three other buildings were also damaged by the fire causing six families to be displaced, a total of 34 people.

The Springfield Republican has the full story and details HERE.

A 54-YR.OLD MAN IN TANGSTEDT, GERMANY, set out to kill some weeds and ended up homeless this past Thursday.  AFP reports that the unidentified man was using a landscaper’s flame-thrower that is used to burn out weeds growing in sidewalk and roadway cracks to attack some weeds in his backyard garden.

While burning off the weeds, he accidentally set his hedge on fire.  The hedge fire soon spread to his garden shed which fed the blaze with a variety of fuels.  While he was attacking his shed fire with a garden hose, embers from the fire landed on the roof of his house and set it afire, also.  Instead of calling the fire brigade then, he continued with his garden hose preconnect as the roof was burning off of his house.  Eventually somebody called the Feuerwehr and after bringing in 7 engines and about 150 volunteers, they knocked the fire down and kept it from spreading to the neighboring homes.  The house is now completely uninhabitable and suffering about 100,000 Euros in damages.

This is the second time in less than three months that a Tangstedt resident has destroyed his home while burning garden weeds.  On April 24 another man who was using a burner lost his mansion-size house in the same manner.

The Hamburger Abendblatt has the STORY.

A RICHMOND, CALIFORNIA, TEENAGER WAS SETTING OFF BOTTLE ROCKETS inside the garage of his family’s home Thursday afternoon.  You can guess what happened next.

The resulting 2-alarm fire destroyed the duplex dwelling and displaced a total of 12 people while causing heavy damage to a neighboring house.

The police had already been there earlier in the day when he had been found setting off bottle rockets in his back yard.  They confiscated what they could find of his supply and left.  But the boy had more hidden away and decided to launch them inside the garage where they couldn’t be seen or heard.

The boy told the officer when he came back the 2nd time,  ”You told us not to shoot any bottle rockets from the backyard, so we went into the garage and lit them off in the garage so no one could complain and we couldn’t get caught by the police.”

The boy’s cousin, Juan Carlos-Delos, 20, faces charges of contributing to the delinquency of a minor for allowing the youth to resume lighting fireworks. The boy could face juvenile court charges of causing an illegal fire with property damage.

KGO-TV has a good video report HERE.

A FIRE LATE THURSDAY NIGHT IN SEATTLE, WASHINGTON, caused a full power outage in a building that houses several internet server farms including Microsoft’s Bing Travel and Verizon’s DSL service for the Seattle area.  Also affected was Authorize.net, a credit card authorization site that services over 250,000 online retail merchants. 

Microsoft said that only Bing’s travel feature was affected and that all other Bing sites are operating normally from other locations.

KOMO-TV and radio operated from there too and were off the air for a while.  They are now broadcasting from remote locations.  Fisher Communications, which owns the complex, also owns and operates KOMO.

KING-TV Ch. 5 has this video report:

This is the second time in just under a year that an electrical fire has knocked out the server farms in the building.  Fisher Plaza bills itself as “…the only mission-critical business community in the Northwest combining Class A office, data center, colocation, and retail space with 21st century communications and media services.”

“Pretty frustrating,” one customer told CNET News.   ”I understand problems happen, but this the second time in a year that we have had to explain to our customers about an outage. This is supposed to be a ‘world class’ facility. Brings up a lot of questions that are still unanswered from the last outage.”

The Seattle Times is reporting:

The small fire, which broke out around 11 p.m. Thursday at the complex near Seattle Center, apparently began with a failure in KOMO’s equipment, which caused a short, said Seattle City Light spokeswoman Connie McDougall.

It happened in the garage level of one of the buildings in Fisher Plaza, at an electrical vault, where KOMO’s transformers meet the city’s power lines, she said.

Many of the internet customers were able to eventually transfer their service to other servers, but by late Friday night the power was still off in the building.  “Fisher is bringing in electrical generators to restore power to the building, at which time it can further assess the situation. The Company is working to restore normal service to its customers as soon as possible,”  Fisher said in a statement.

Blogger Kyle Mulka is maintaining a list of websites that are affected by the outage HERE.

Read the full story in the Seattle Times HERE.
The Post-Intelligencer had MORE.

THE DEATH TOLL FROM THE HIGH-RISE FIRE IN LONDON, ENGLAND, Friday afternoon has risen to 6.  (See yesterday’s Firegeezer report HERE.)  The fire brigade is crediten with making 30 rescues from the blazing 12-story apartment building with 15 of the victims needing hospitalization.

BBC News

BBC News is reporting today:

Ch Supt Wayne Chance said: “We would always treat a situation like this as suspicious because we don’t know the cause… in the first instance.”

Ch Supt Chance, of the Met Police, added: “…We are treating the scenes as a crime scene which is the reason why we can’t allow anybody to go in there. So on the basis that we don’t know how this fire started, that is why we are treating it as suspicious.”

He said the fire, which was tackled by more than 100 firefighters, had spread rapidly to the 11th floor.

The bodies of a six-year-old child and two adults were found at the scene. The three-week-old baby, a seven-year-old child, and a woman were later pronounced dead in hospital.

All of the victims came from a number of different families.

Sky News has some additional fire footage:

Updated, scroll down.

LONDON, ENGLAND, FIREFIGHTERS ARE STILL ON THE SCENE of a high-rise apartment building where fire was reported about 4:25 this afternoon, local time (11:25 am Eastern).

The fire started on the fourth floor and moved via the “communal areas” (elevator lobbies?…Ed.) up to the 11th floor of the 12-story building.

BBC News photo

More than 100 FF’s are involved in both firefighting and an intensive search and rescue effort directed toward an estimated 30 people who remain trapped in the building.  Officials have confirmed that 2 children have perished and 10 people have been transported to the hospital with 3 of them in serious condition.

The BBC reports that an LFB spokesman said, “A number of rescues have been carried out in extremely difficult circumstances and fire crews equipped with extended duration breathing apparatus are working very hard to reach those still affected and carry out an exhaustive search of the building.”

This incident is still ongoing and we’ll be updating as information is released.

Sky News has an early report from the scene:

Update:
The Metropolitan Police have disclosed that the two fatals were ages 3 weeks and 7 years.

It has also been reported at 9:07 local time by the London Fire Brigade that the fire is out.

Update #2:
The Press  Association has released two photos of the exterior just after the fire was out:

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