ST. LOUIS – Fire officials are releasing more details about a five-story warehouse that caught fire over the weekend near downtown St. Louis.
An enormous plume of smoke could be seen for miles across the St. Louis skyline on Saturday. A vacant warehouse went up in flames on 1st and O’Fallon streets in the Near North Riverfront neighborhood, not far from the Horseshoe St. Louis Casino. Crews battled the fire for hours. Ladder trucks were still there on Sunday to douse hot spots.
“The building’s been empty for quite some time,” Dave Hailey said.
Hailey manages a truck driving school nearby.
“There’s homeless people that go in and out all the time,” he said. “The owners of the property did board it all up. Then they bricked in all the lower windows to try and keep people out, but they still get in there, and I don’t know if that’s what started it or what.”
St. Louis Fire Capt. Garon Mosby doesn’t think that’s what happened in this case.
“We’ve been here for several smaller fires where we were able to go in with an attack line and knock down the fire,” he said. “What one of the captains explained to me is some of the floors were completely empty, and then some of the floors had a heavy fire load—just boxes of paper and other materials.”
A demolition is on standby once the fire department puts out the rest of the hot spots. Donald Parker, the project manager of Bellon Wrecking, told FOX 2 they would tear down the building for “emergency purposes.”
Meantime, Capt. Mosby said his department is still working to figure out how this fire began in the first place.
“I almost pause to call it suspicious, but it is,” Mosby said. “You don’t get this much fire at 6 o’clock in the morning, so there are people up and, in the area, the casino is right here, so to have that much fire that quickly and that early on, it would lead us to speculate that an accelerant was used. But what I can speculate and what I can prove are two different things.”
As the investigation continues, firefighters have had some major challenges getting the fire out, including a major collapse of several portions of the building. Ameren Missouri had to shut off power to nearby businesses until it was safe to restore it.
“At the height of this, we had logistically a fourth alarm,” Capt. Mosby said. “It wasn’t called that way, but we had enough equipment out here for fourth-alarm status, which is about 85–90 firefighters. We had six aerial waterways in operation. Basically, it’s a surround-and-drown type of attack.”
And while that fire was going on, another one happened a little more than two miles away on Salisbury Street. Crews blocked off the intersection until they put it out. There were no reports of any injuries in either fire.
FOX 2 will update this story with more information as it becomes available.