Sept. 12--Firefighters continued to douse hot spots this morning after an extra-alarm fire tore through a warehouse filled with stacks of wooden pallets in Brighton Park on the Southwest Side.
No injuries were reported and firefighters were able to keep the 4-11 alarm blaze from spreading to a building next door that contained paper and propane.
The first call about the fire came in around 11 p.m. from someone on a cell phone who spotted smoke coming from the warehouse at 3710 S. California Ave., according to Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford. The fire was quickly raised to a 4-11 as firefighters worked to get water to the fast-moving flames.
The first firefighters set up "inline" operations -- a process of getting water from distant hydrants by staggering fire engines every 300 feet or so between the hydrants and the fire. The engines, connected by hoses, pumped the water to tower ladders and snorkel trucks that were fighting the fire from overhead.
Hoses criss-crossed a storage yard south of the warehouse and the surrounding neighborhood. At some points during the night, some of the fire engines were pumping more than 1,000 gallons of water each minute, Langford said.
"We train for that. We have hydrants, we went inline to make sure we had adequate water supply we needed to have," First Deputy Fire Commissioner Charles Stewart III said. "There were no hydrants in this shipping yard, but we got water and we put water on the fire.
Fire crews remained "defensive" all night, not entering the warehouse as they worked to "surround and drown" the blaze, Langford said.
After more than two hours of chasing the flames from one end of the building to another, the alarms were struck out and fire declared under control. Crew remained on the scene this morning, putting out small fires throughout the charred warehouse.
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