Flames and choking smoke swept through the sixth floor of a busy 10-story office building in midtown Atlanta Friday, killing at least five people and injuring dozens more.
One woman leaped from a window of the glass office tower on Peachtree Street and lived, and firefighters evacuated the building by carrying people down long extension ladders as smoke poured from shattered windows."We had firefighters who used up all their air in rescuing people and had to run to windows for air," said D.M. Chamberlin, deputy chief of operations for the Atlanta Fire Department.
Office workers stood anxiously at the windows of the tower - called the Peachtree 25th Building - waiting to be rescued as others were carried to ambulances on stretchers and victims seated on the ground were given oxygen.
One trembling woman hugged and kissed firefighters as they brought her to the foot of a ladder. Scores of office workers stood and sat along sidewalks, wiping smoke from their eyes and taking oxygen from rescue workers with tanks and masks.
Fire officials called for a helicopter to rescue a man who was hanging from a broken window at the back of the building, holding another man who was unconscious. Ladders were unable to reach them. The unconscious man died later.
"When we arrived at the scene, we had people hanging out the back windows and the front windows," Chamberlin said. "It presented a real problem. One lady had already jumped."
Mayor Andrew Young called it "the worst fire in my eight years in office."
Police said the woman who jumped apparently broke both legs in the six-story fall. She was reported in critical condition at Piedmont Hospital after surgery.
A witness who saw the woman from a restaurant across the street said he and others urged her not to jump.
"We saw her leg come out the window and we just kept screaming, `Please don't jump!' " he said. "But we didn't have a ladder or anything and the fire trucks weren't here yet, so all we could do was to tell her to please not jump and to keep calm."
Officials said five people died and 38 were injured. More than 20 of the injured were hospitalized.
The building was not equipped with sprinkler systems, which officials said could have limited the damage and casualties.
"I have no problem professionally saying that if there were sprinklers I suspect it would have saved lives," Chamberlin said.
He said a law requiring buildings to be equipped with automatic sprinkler systems was not put into effect until at least 10 years after the burned building was constructed in 1962.
Atlanta Public Safety spokesman Keith Williams said the fire broke out around 10:30 a.m. EDT in the building, which houses the Atlanta branch of the National Transportation Safety Board and a half dozen other federal offices.
Chamberlin said the cause of the blaze is under investigation, but that fire officials have determined it was started by something similar to a short in the building's electrical supply system.
Authorities speculated the fire began when an electrician tried to change a fuse. The electrician was one of the five killed.