Suspicious Fires and Blast Hit L.A., Culver City Areas : Destruction: Early morning incidents result in more than $1 million in damage but no injuries. ‘It sounded like wartime,’ a witness says.

A fire of suspicious origin raced through a paper warehouse in a World War II-vintage Quonset hut near the San Diego Freeway early Thursday, followed by a deafening explosion as a high-power electrical line short-circuited and rocked an eight-block area.

The fire on Teale Street, an industrial area of Los Angeles just south of the Fox Hills Mall, was raging by 5 a.m., witnesses said, sending flames 50 feet into the air.

Twenty minutes later the power went out “and we saw a flash like a rocket from the Fourth of July come shooting this way across the wires,” said Richard Estrada, who was watching from the front lawn of his apartment house on Jefferson Boulevard.

The surge of electricity snapped another high-voltage cable two blocks away in Culver City, dropping a live wire onto a chain-link fence around a welding supply shop that held hundreds of cylinders of explosive gasses.

The fence relayed 16,000 volts of electricity through a water pipe into the building of General Welding Supply, where internal wiring conduits acted like a “heating element” and set it aflame, said Battalion Chief Bob Dewberry of the Culver City Fire Department.

“Miraculously, not one tank caught fire,” said Ernie Trevino, a dispatcher at General Welding. “If it did, it probably would have been the biggest explosion you’d have seen in a long time.”

As it was, residents of the area might have thought they were under attack.

“It was a huge explosion. It sounded like wartime. It was a bright flash like a bomb going off, and you could feel the concussion. My wife was almost thrown to the street,” said Seth Callander, a sculptor who lives two doors down from the paper warehouse.

Bill Estay, owner of Mailing Services, a firm that distributes tourism brochures, said that he lost about a million pieces of printed matter. But he said that his main building, which houses vital equipment, was spared except for damage to one outside wall.

“I lost a truck in there too,” he said, gesturing to the wet, smoky piles of charred rubble. “All you can see is a bumper.”

The fires, near the corner of Jefferson Boulevard and Mesmer Avenue, were contained by 6 a.m., and resulted in more than $1 million in damage but no injuries.

The fires caused mild traffic problems for early commuters, but an unrelated spill of swimming pool chemicals later in the morning clogged traffic for several miles on the San Diego and the Santa Monica freeways until nearly 11 a.m.

A Los Angeles City Fire Department spokesman said that three gallons of chlorine and muriatic acid were spilled and posed no danger.

In addition to destroying Estay’s stock of travel brochures, the fire on Teale Street also caused hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to a group of six small businesses in an adjoining building.

Arson investigators were at the scene, and Jim Wells, a Fire Department spokesman, said the cause is suspicious and under investigation.