A fire at a massive building in Vernon has flared up for a second day, sending plumes of thick, black smoke into the air Tuesday morning.
The fire started in a 15,000-square-foot flooring business at South Alameda and East 55th streets about 1 a.m. Monday and took more than four hours to extinguish — or so crews thought.
But Tuesday morning at about 4:30 a.m., the Los Angeles Fire Department said the fire had kicked up again, and was now also burning power poles nearby.
Video from the scene showed the roads surrounding the building filled with firefighters and equipment, with crews spraying water into the piles of mangled metal and burning material on the lot. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power shut down power lines that were posing a hazard, officials said.
“Crews faced the complicated task of accessing and extinguishing pockets of fire hidden within large quantities of palletized storage,” the LAFD said in a press release Monday when they initially announced the fire had been knocked down. “Special units including Heavy Equipment and RS3 (LAFD’s firefighting robot) were brought in to help expose, access, and pull apart the burning materials.”
The cleanup effort around the fire was expected to take several days, and that was before Tuesday’s flare-up. The fire is not expected to impact train service on a nearby rail line and the smell of smoke should dissipate throughout the week, LAFD officials said.
No injuries have been reported as of Tuesday morning.
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