Fire Rips Through Vacant Warehouse in Portland, OR
oregonlive.com
(TNS)
A fast-moving fire tore through the long-abandoned Centennial Mills warehouse Sunday afternoon, doing enough damage that the 116-year-old building was at risk of total collapse, a Portland Fire & Rescue spokesman said.
The fire, at 1362 N.W. Naito Parkway, shut down the street while nearly 90 firefighters scrambled to douse the flames.
“This is a location where Portland Fire and Rescue has responded to previously,” PF&R spokesman Rick Graves told reporters. “We’ve had multiple fires, smaller fires, in the lower floors. We’ve always been able to extinguish them pretty quickly.”
But Sunday’s fire proved to be an entirely different type of blaze. The flames quickly spread to all floors as the concrete exterior of the building funneled the heat like a “chimney,” Graves said, and in less than two hours, every floor had collapsed.
Graves said there was no evidence so far that anyone was inside the building at the time of the fire but said they haven’t been able to rule it out.
The fire department said in a social media post there was heavy fire throughout the building and warned it could collapse. As such, it was unsafe for firefighters to try to enter the building and douse the flames from within, the social media post said.
Graves said that if the structure fully collapsed overnight, the plan was to “stay out of the way.”
“We are positioned in a location of safety so if a collapse occurs, there will not be anyone injured,” Graves said. “We will then dispatch out the proper response to address whatever type of emergency that may occur.”
Naito remained closed off, and there was no one in neighboring buildings, according to Graves.
“The only folks that will be in the area are actively working members of PF&R so if a collapse occurs, no one should be in harms way,” although officials would be able to quickly respond in the event of an emergency, Graves said.
Almost 90 Portland firefighters worked the scene of the blaze while dozens of people gathered to watch the action. Some onlookers covered their mouth and nose with their shirt or tried to rinse their eyes as ashes floated several blocks onto surrounding streets and sidewalks.
Officials said the cause of the fire was under investigation.
As The Oregonian/OregonLive reported last October, the Portland Design Commission approved a proposal by Oregon developer Stuart Lindquist to transform Centennial Mills into three mid-rise, mixed-use buildings.
Lindquist’s plans call for 272 residential units, ground-floor retail spaces and public connections to the Willamette through a “woonerf,” a Dutch concept for a street shared by pedestrians and slow-moving cars. The redevelopment also would leave room for a potential future bridge over Naito.
Plans also called for turning part of the heavily tagged, dilapidated site into a nightclub, according to reporting in the Portland Business Journal in April.
Prosper Portland, the city’s economic development agency, spent nearly a quarter-century trying to find ways to redevelop the mill property before it sold to private developers in 2024. Prosper sold the property to Oregon-based MLR, which sold it to a group led by Lindquist.
Lindquist, who also owns the building in South Portland that houses U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the target of regular demonstrations since June, did not respond to a call for comment Sunday evening.
©2026 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit oregonlive.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.