Tower Survivors Ignore Rules : Fire Etches Tales of Fear, Heroism

Charles Luckman was driving on Sunset Boulevard about 11 p.m. Wednesday when he heard the news on his car radio. The First Interstate Bank building, the tallest building in Los Angeles, was on fire.

That was his building.

Luckman, 78, is retired now. But, 20 years ago, designing that building had been his life. He pulled over to the curb.

“For an hour or maybe an hour and a half, I just sat there, listening,” he said Friday. “I prayed, and I seldom have done that in my lifetime. I was fearful that there might be hundreds and hundreds of casualties.”

He thought of going downtown, but didn’t seem to be able to turn on the ignition and drive. Traffic would be blocked off, he told himself. He wouldn’t be able to get close anyway.

He could imagine the scene. Alarms--whooping sirens, powered by batteries and set to go off if a room filled with smoke or the temperature reached 128 degrees--would be wailing on all 62 floors. Elevators, keyed to return to home base in case of fire, would be grounding themselves.

A Thought of Death

Then he thought of the only other building he had designed in which people had been killed. It had been in New York several years before; an elevator cable had snapped and seven people died.

“I hope they don’t panic and take the elevators,” he thought. “Dear God, don’t let anyone panic. Please, let them take the stairwells.”

But people did panic. And things did go wrong, deadly wrong, things that might have killed many people had the fire broken out at 10:30 a.m. But it broke out somewhere around 10:30 p.m., and only one man died.

The stairwells became chimneys as soon as firefighters propped open fire doors to bring in personnel and equipment.

Perversely, many of the elevators kept running, up and down through the fire floors. People who took them broke the rules, but they saved their lives. Only one elevator--freight car 33--stopped and refused to move from the 12th floor, where the fire broke out. And there, Alexander Handy, 24, a building maintenance engineer, died.

The whooping sirens went off, but the only people who seemed to hear them were security guards and others down below who already knew the building was on fire.

An overhead system of speakers had been put in to make emergency announcements. But the voices that spoke through them spoke only in English. And many of the roughly 50 people in the building at the time understood only Spanish.

No fire sprinklers were in Luckman’s design; they were not required by law until 1974. Two sprinkler company workers frantically tried to turn on the new system--which was 90% done--even as smoke rose around them.

Certainly there were heroes.

Two Croatian women janitors who mustered strength to save co-workers whose language they didn’t speak. A security guard who rode an elevator up through the fire to rescue men stranded above--and then came back down again. Helicopter pilots who circled the building with near-zero visibility. Firefighters whose helmet badges blistered in temperatures they did not even have words to describe.

At 10:37 p.m., the Los Angeles Fire Department registered three calls on its emergency tape. None came from the building on fire. Two were from security guards in adjacent buildings. The third was from a man in yet a third building: “You’ve got a heck of a fire burning in the top of the First Interstate Bank building,” the caller said.

When it opened in 1973, the building was hailed as “the tallest building in the West, the 10th tallest in the United States, and the tallest bank building in the world.” Rising from a plaza level paved with “warm, flame-finished gray granite” were walls of “solar bronze glass” that tapered slightly up to the top, 858 feet high.

Inside, high-speed elevators, traveling up to 24 feet a second, appeared to “float above the banking space,” the press releases said. There were 33 elevators in all, 31 for passengers and two adjacent elevators for freight.

Ready to Go Home

Freight car No. 33 was Melchor Campos’ elevator. He was emptying trash cans on the loading dock beneath the building a little after 10:30 Wednesday night.

Alex Handy had just come down and was getting ready to go home at the end of the late shift. He had a long drive to the new Cape Cod-style house in Palmdale, where he lived with his wife, Kim, and their 2-year-old daughter, Brittany.

Campos heard a voice sputter over Handy’s walkie-talkie.

“There’s a fire alarm going off on the 15th floor,” he thought it said in English.

“Want to take me up?” Handy asked Campos.

Unable to speak English well, Campos gestured toward the load of trash still on the dock. “No,” he said. Besides, the keys were inside the elevator, and Handy knew how to operate it.

“OK, have to go now,” Campos remembers Handy saying as he entered the elevator.

The doors closed.

A few minutes later, Campos pushed the button for the elevator. It never came.

Nobody ever got an exact count of how many people were in the building that night. There were four security guards, two engineers, at least two sprinkler company workers, two banking officials working late, and probably a handful of others.

Mostly there were janitors, 37 men and women from the Commercial Building Maintenance Co. All but a handful were immigrants from Mexico or Central America. Four or five were Croatians from Yugoslavia. Some were very young, others were into their 60s. One was pregnant.

They ordinarily worked alone, one or two to a floor, scattered throughout the farthest corners of the tower.

Smoke Is a Signal

Radmila Radich, a 40-year-old Yugoslav woman, was polishing the glass table tops in the Bank of Seoul offices on the 19th floor when Jose Garcia, who happened to be working nearby, signaled to smoke spewing from an air conditioning vent.

She ran for the stairwell; there was the smell of smoke inside. He ran for the elevator; it opened.

Radich then made the most frightening decision of her life, and it took only an instant.

“If I go down (the stairs) alone, I might die alone,” she thought to herself. “If something happens to him, who will help him?”

She knew they weren’t supposed to do it, but they took the elevator anyway.

As it descended, it filled with smoke. She punched the emergency intercom button inside, but no voice answered.

“We held each other, we started to cry,” she said. Neither spoke each other’s language. Instinctively, they reached out and held each other.

“Senor,” she cried. “Senor.”

It was about all the Spanish she knew.

“Senora,” he said back, holding her. “Senora, senora, senora.”

Heat Like a Furnace

Suddenly the elevator stopped, right on the 12th floor, and the doors opened. Smoke, terrible, choking, “poison” smoke, billowed in. And the heat was like a furnace. They punched the buttons in vain. It was useless.

Neither had worked much on this floor. Trying to find a stairwell, she opened by mistake a door to an office. A blast of heat--hotter than any heat she had ever imagined--blasted her and Garcia to the floor.

They crawled back to the elevator and gasped for air through the crack in the floor. Radich vomited “black stuff.” Garcia was near collapse.

“I thought of my family, my sons,” Radich would say later. “They are going to lose me, (I thought). They are going to bury me.”

Then, something told her to pull herself off the floor and find a door. Weeping, she found the stairwell and screamed out to Garcia, who seemed to signal through the smoke for her to go on without him.

“You have to walk with me,” she told him in English. “You have to get up!”

Miraculously, the stairwell was clear. Empty. They were below the fire. When they reached the lobby, Radich saw firefighters in yellow hats preparing to enter the building.

Arrive in 3 Minutes

According to Fire Department logs, the first trucks arrived at the scene at 10:40 p.m., three minutes after the first calls came in. At the fire’s height, more than 58 trucks and 275 firefighters--40% of the department’s on-duty firefighters--would be battling the fire.

Deputy Chief Don Anthony, 54, ran out of his Canoga Park home, turned on the flashing lights of his car and tore downtown at 70 m.p.h. He saw the flames as soon as he came down the Cahuenga Pass. Still more than eight miles away, he thought: “This is the worst high-rise fire in the history of the city.”

When he arrived, most of the 12th and 13th floors were already consumed. The building was tall, but it was also narrow. There were few solid interior walls to stop the rush of flames across the floors.

Anthony, a 31-year-veteran, would think of the fire as a wedding cake. Each floor was a tier. If his plan succeeded, the fire would be cut back, confined to a smaller and smaller space as it burned upward.

He would stop it, he decided, at the 16th floor. The 17th floor, he was told, was empty, with none of the plastics and legal files and computer equipment that let off high-temperature, obnoxious fumes on the floors below.

If his plan didn’t work, he would later say, “I’m not sure we could have saved the building.”

About 10:40 or 10:45, an announcement came over emergency speakers in the ceiling. Noel Estrada, project manager of the Commercial Building Maintenance Co., which employs the janitorial crew, heard it in his office on the 42nd floor. He remembered a voice saying something like:

“There is a fire somewhere in the building. . . . We don’t know the location, but will keep you informed.”

Soon afterward, he said, there was another announcement: “Emergency. Emergency. There is a fire in the building. Please evacuate to the nearest stairwell.”

Felt No Shaking

Some people in the building say they never heard those words. Others who did hear them didn’t understand English, and were confused because they knew from an earthquake drill six weeks before that the speakers were supposed to help them in case of an earthquake. But the building wasn’t shaking.

Maria Monterroso, 25, of El Salvador, happened to be standing by an elevator bank on the 30th floor when the speaker above her crackled. She didn’t understand the words, but, almost simultaneously, she saw white smoke rising from the nearby stairwell. Six weeks pregnant, she thought of her unborn baby and panicked.

“Should I take the stairs or the elevator?” she asked herself. She didn’t know where the fire was, only that it was close. She punched the elevator button and a moment later found herself on the mezzanine. Without knowing it, she had passed through the belly of the fire.

Gregorio Sarabia, 28, from Mexico, was emptying waste baskets in a law firm on the 45th floor. He understood only two words of the announcement: emergency meant emergencia, and fire meant fuego. He left his cleaning cart and ran, bumping into a worker who had been installing a sprinkling system. Both knew from the earthquake drill that they weren’t supposed to take the elevators.

Sister Is Missing

So, they raced down two flights of stairs, deeper and deeper into smoke. On the 43rd floor, they turned and found an unlocked fire door and entered an office area. They punched the elevator button and rode down to safety.

Below, amid falling glass, smoke and terror, Sarabia found his brother, who also worked in the cleaning crew. Together, they looked around and realized their big sister, Albertina, 39, who normally worked between the 25th and 35th floors, was missing.

The went back into an elevator.

“We were trembling, we were so nervous, but our minds were set,” he would say later. They pushed the button for floor 29, and each ran out to a different stairwell, screaming their sister’s name.

“Gregorio!” Sarabia heard his sister’s voice amid other screams.

“Albertina!” he shouted into the smoke. “What floor are you on?”

“Thirty-first!”

“Go to the lobby and wait by the elevators!”

The brothers got on the elevator and pushed 31.

Moments later the doors opened, and Albertina, along with five others, stumbled in. Tearful, coughing.

Then, for the third time that night, Gregorio rode an elevator through the fire.

Tuck Wong, 49, who had worked in the building since it opened, turned off his industrial vacuum cleaner on the 58th floor and moved closer to a speaker to try to make out the words.

When he realized what was wrong, he ran back to the center of the floor, where Zora Imamovic, a cleaning crew leader, and three co-workers had gathered.

Suddenly, they heard a voice on Imamovic’s walkie-talkie.

“Help! Help! Car 33 is in flames,” a terrified voice cried. Although they did not know it then, it was Alex Handy, whose elevator had stopped on the 12th floor.

They heard screams. Then there was silence. Frantically, Imamovic changed batteries. But it was the screaming, not the batteries, that had stopped.

The group on the 58th floor began worrying about their own survival.

“We don’t know what floor the fire is on,” Wong said. “We know we have to go up to the roof . . . It’s a long, long way down, but it’s only four floors up. . . . if you go up, it’s easy.”

One young Spanish-speaking woman, Arminda Gonzalez, 37, ran downstairs into smoke.

“No te vayas! No te vayas!” Imamovic screamed at her, summoning the only Spanish words she could think of. “Don’t go away!”

Later Gonzalez would say, “If it hadn’t been for Zora, we might all be dead.”

When they arrived on the roof to await rescue by a police helicopter, Wong stepped back.

“Ladies first,” he said.

On the 42nd floor, Noel Estrada and Francisco Robleto, management officials of the janitorial company, were trapped by the smoke, and could not summon the elevators. So they called downstairs to the security guard, time and time again.

Supervisor Donald Eliason, 24, a six-year veteran of the Pedus Security Co., knew Estrada, but barely recognized his voice through the coughing.

“Help me, help me!” Estrada cried.

Eliason knew you weren’t supposed to take elevators during a fire. He did it anyway. He had noticed that car 8, a freight elevator Estrada said was adjacent to Car 33 but opened in a different direction, was still working.

Taking a Chance

“I kind of chanced it and headed up to 42,” he said. “It started picking up smoke . . . as soon as I took off, and it was full by the 20th floor. But the elevator kept running, so I kept on going up.”

When he reached 42, Eliason screamed out into the smoke and two men ran inside. He was ready to head down when one ran back out and dragged in a third man who seemed unconscious.

Eliason pushed BL for “bank level.”

But the elevator went up. Then it slowed, and seemed to go down. It just stopped, between floors.

Smoke filled the elevator. It grew so dark that even though lights were on, nobody could see the elevator buttons or the emergency phone. Everybody tried to hold their breath. Estrada remembers Robleto jumping up and down. Eliason remembers someone yelling “Dios! Dios!” (God! God!) and praying in Spanish.

“We thought we were going to die in there,” Estrada said. “I had always heard that before people die, they see a light, like through a tunnel, and I saw that light.”

Estrada and Robleto remember the elevator holding there five or 10 minutes. Eliason remembers the whole rescue taking three or four minutes. But, for reasons no one understood, the elevator proceeded downward.

They had passed to safety within a few feet of where Alex Handy had died.

Melinda Skaar, 28, a financial analyst with First Interstate, was working late on a report to the bank’s board of directors. She didn’t hear the whooping siren or the loudspeaker announcements.

But she happened to be passing the receptionist’s desk on the 37th floor when the phone rang and she picked it up. It was a security guard. He was calling each known occupied floor to tell people there was a fire.

She warned a colleague, Stephen Oksas, 31, an assistant vice president who also happened to be working late. Together they headed for the stairwell. But the stairwell was filled with smoke.

Stuck almost exactly in the middle of the skyscraper, they retreated to an office. They made telephone calls to 911, to security guards, to determine exactly where the fire was, and to let rescuers know their exact location.

Then the phone went dead. Their office began filling with smoke.

Coolly, calling upon analytical skills they used in their work, they waited for rescue, and started to discuss their options. Above all, they knew, they were not supposed to take the elevator.

Most of the people trapped inside the building never saw the flames. Most of those outside would never forget them.

One by one, each firefighter, security officer and bank official called to the scene would stand for a moment in fearful awe, craning their necks to look up at 50-foot-high flames eating a waist into one of the tallest buildings in America.

Each of the firefighters would have to climb at least 10 floors to a staging area, and another two floors to reach the fire, carrying hoses and tanks of oxygen. Experts figure it takes a minute a floor for a firefighter to go up with such equipment. And, even before the fire was over, firefighters would be saying among themselves that, had fire broken out 10 or 20 stories higher up, the tower would have been lost.

Terrifying Scene

The scene that confronted the firefighters inside the building was surreal.

It would remind one firefighter of Dante’s Inferno. Another would look at the glowing metal girders and think of branding irons. Water cascading down the stairwells would make another think of salmon trying to head upriver.

“When you first walk in from the stairwell into the fire floor, all you see is a roaring orange ball,” Capt. Joe Chavez, who arrived about 11 p.m., would say later, describing it as if it were happening all over again.

“Envision being at the beach and watching the waves come in. That’s the way the fire rolls across the ceiling, just huge waves of fire, rolling. You spray the hose and the orange blacks out and turns to steam. At that point, you lose all visibility. You just feel steam. Then, you just keep moving toward more orange.

“Orange is the enemy, and you keep working toward it.”

Poison Smoke

Behind those waves of roiling orange, molded plastic chairs were burning literally into nothing but poison smoke. Metal desks were melting into pools of gray. And modern file cabinets into pools of black.

Firefighters were consuming 30-minute tanks of oxygen in 15 or 20 minutes. Sometimes, they would lean over high pressure hoses to gasp bits of air that came out with the water.

Sam Cooper, 45, chief pilot of C Platoon, a city fire air division, was circling the building in a helicopter.

“Desks were falling out of the building from 15 floors up and crashing to the ground,” Cooper said later. “Big sheets of windows were falling down like floating leaves.”

Gasses and heat were so intense, rising up under his helicopter, that at first it was impossible for him to scan the floors for signs of survivors.

When he dipped to around the 50th floor, he spotted a man furiously waving a curtain at him.

“We stayed with him with the light to assure him that we were attempting to rescue him. We didn’t want him to wander off and get lost and be overcome by smoke.”

But Roberto Lopez disappeared anyway.

Planning an Escape

When the fire broke out, Lopez, 40, had tried the stairwell. He had left a vacuum cleaner cord in the door so it wouldn’t lock--just in case.

Then, he had walked down 10 flights.

Almost suffocated by smoke, he had turned around and headed back up to find fresher air inside an interior cubicle he had been vacuuming. Then he went to the window and waved the curtains at a helicopter outside. He found himself in the spotlight of a beam from Cooper’s helicopter. He saw burning papers flying up in the air just outside.

Two hours later, he thought he was going to die. With the beam still on him, he began to pray.

“I asked forgiveness for my sins and thought of my (three) little children,” he said.

In the end, it was flashlights from firefighters, guided by the spotlight from the helicopter outside, that found him.

That was about 2:30 a.m.

That left only Melinda Skaar and Steve Oksas on the 37th floor.

For four of the five hours they spent together, neither showed the other an expression of despair. Their fear, that they could die together in this office, “was never really verbalized, which was good,” Oksas would say later.

They knew people were out there who would try to rescue them. The question was whether they would be rescued before they were overcome by smoke. As acrid fumes filled their office, they fashioned air filters out of Sparkletts water bottles and gulped air from closed cupboards.

As the smoke became denser, they rationed breaths from a small office refrigerator.

Acts of Desperation

They finally became so desperate to breathe that they tried, again and again and again, to hurl office furniture through the three-eighths-inch thick glass.

“But everything only bounced back,” Skaar said later.

At 3 a.m. they were in a small copying room where the air seemed slightly cleaner. Skaar heard a helicopter and went out to try to signal.

Oksas, rational to the end, made a last attempt to keep himself alive without ever really acknowledging that he might die.

“I knew I was going to pass out,” Oksas would say later. “So I grabbed a T-shirt and doused it with water. If I was going to fall asleep, I was going to fall asleep with this shirt over my face.”

Skaar could see the pilot. She knew he could see her. But it made no difference. For the first time, alone now and out of sight of her colleague, she began to cry.

“I thought, ‘I’m going to die here,’ ” she said afterward. “ ‘It’s my birthday on Sunday and I won’t even be there to turn 29.’ ”

As the effects of fumes began to numb her body, she made it back to the small room. But Oksas lay against the door. Skaar collapsed outside, trying to breathe the fine strand of air near a window whose weather stripping she had tried to pry loose with a scissors.

Sometime after 4 a.m., the firefighters found her, and she pointed to Oksas.

Oksas regained consciousness in an ambulance to the sound of a paramedic asking him questions he couldn’t remember the answers to, like what was his name, and what month of the year it was.

Firefighters finally pried open the doors of car 33 about the time Skaar and Oksas were rescued. Inside, they found the charred body of Alex Handy.

Two days after the fire, asked why he had not taken the elevator up with the young engineer, Melchor Campos didn’t say that he had stayed on the loading dock to finish emptying the trash.

He said something else: “It wasn’t my time time to die.”

HIGH-RISE ON FIRE: LIFE AND DEATH STORIES

Zora Imamovic. 58th floor. Cleaning foreman heard Alexander Handy’s voice screaming for help. Led cleaning crew to roof.

Tuck Wong. 58th floor. Turned off his noisy vacuum and finally heard warning. Along with four others led by Imamovic, escaped to roof and rescued by helicopter.

Roberto Lopez. 50th floor. Vacuuming an office heard announcement, then ran down 10 flights of stairs. Turned back by suffocating fumes, found refuge in interior office, waving curtains at a rescue helicopter. Firefighters reached him at 2:30 a.m.

Gregoria Sarabia. 45th floor. Emptying trash, heard announcement. Took elevator to mezzanine, but went back up to 31st to rescue his sister and 5 others. Same elevator returned them to the mezzanine.

Noel Estrada and Francisco Robleto. 42nd floor. Maintenance supervisors. Rescued by security guard. Escaped in freight elevator.

Stephen Oksas and Melinda Skaar. 37th floor. First Interstate Bank employees, working late, were trapped for five hours. Both had collapsed when rescuers arrived at 4 a.m.

Maria Monterroso. 30th floor. Saw smoke billowing from a stairwell. Took elevator to mezzanine.

Radmila Radich. 19th floor. Dusting when co-worker pointed out smoke from air conditioner. Took elevator, but it stopped on 12th floor, scene of the fire. Used stairs to escape.

Alexander Handy. 12th floor. The maintenance engineer was on a lower level when he got message from security guard about fire on 15th floor. Headed up in freight elevator. Got trapped on 12th floor. Found dead by firefighters.

Deputy Chief Don Anthony. Commanded the fire operation from below. Saw the flames as soon as he came down the Cahuenga Pass from his Canoga Park home. “This is the worst high rise fire in the history of the city,” he thought.

This story is based on the reporting of staff writers Mark Arax, Roxane Arnold, Laurie Becklund and Stephanie Chavez. It was written by Becklund.