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A four-alarm fire Tuesday morning consumed much of a five-story apartment building on the corner of Southwest 14th Avenue and Taylor Street. The fire started on the third floor and spread upward to the fourth, Portland Fire & Rescue said.
Firefighters arrived at the scene by 10:30 am and began alerting tenants to evacuate. Rick Graves, a spokesman for Portland Fire & Rescue, tells WW he believes all tenants of the building were evacuated.
Graves added that bureau protocol mandates a second search, which has not yet taken place due to extreme fire conditions. “While we will not be certain of the rescue results, there was not a single resident or community member that approached anyone on scene concerned that someone was missing,” Graves said in an email Tuesday afternoon. “With that, we are encouraged that all residents were evacuated safely but may need a bit of time until we can say so with certainty.”
A fire alarm never sounded, building tenants tell WW. In some cases, tenants on the first and second floors were unaware that a fire had broken out in the floor above. Tenants on the third floor had moved out onto their fire escapes and were in some cases rescued by ladders.
Roughly two hours after the fire began, Norma Jo Hollenbeck stood on the sidewalk roughly a block away from her building, watching as fire crews soaked the fire. Hollenbeck says she was warned by a loud knock on her door by the building’s maintenance man and quickly gathered her daughter and granddaughter and their pets before exiting the building.
“The thing that bothers me the most is, it’s the only time that the fire alarm in that building did not go off,” Hollenbeck says.
She added that false fire alarms had been going off in the building as often as once a day for roughly six months. She says most of the tenants assumed that a person squatting in the building had been pulling the alarm.
A complaint filed with the Portland Bureau of Development Services in December alleged that the building was missing smoke, gas and carbon monoxide detectors, among other code violations. It was subsequently added to the city’s list of dangerous buildings. Oregon Public Broadscasting reports that the building had been inspected again on Monday, and the city found that the building’s owners, SkyNat Limited Partnership, had addressed most but not all of the code violations.
Nicholas Gomez was a tenant on the first floor who didn’t leave the building until his roommate made enough noise to wake him up. Gomez says he heard what he thought was a fire alarm but ignored it because of how frequently the building’s alarms go off. After poking his head out of a window, he realized that it was actually a siren from a fire truck.
Gomez and the rest of the evacuated tenants were moved across the street and eventually a block away as fire trucks arrived.
The fire grew so large that Interstate 405 was closed in both directions.
Power to some of the area was cut as firefighters worked near or under power lines, and nearby streets remain closed. I-405 reopened early Tuesday afternoon, while the streets surrounding the building will remain closed. Graves suspects the fire will continue burning through the night and into tomorrow.
At this time, the fire bureau is still unsure of the structural state of the building and would not rule out the possibility of collapse.
“We’ve moved our rigs away from the collapse zone, and our personnel, so that if we do have structural collapse, we aren’t going to have anything lost,” Graves says.
Graves adds that firefighters’ highest priority at the moment is preventing damage to a neighboring building that stands roughly 5 feet away.