250 firefighters battle massive L.A. blaze

LOS ANGELES - A fierce blaze that destroyed a downtown Los Angeles apartment complex under construction next to a fire house and damaged three nearby buildings on Monday is being examined by arson investigators as a "criminal fire," authorities said.

Commuter traffic into the nation's second-largest city was snarled through the morning rush as authorities shut down a major nearby freeway because of the blaze, which fire officials said erupted overnight and took three hours to bring under control. No injuries were reported.

About 250 firefighters, roughly a fourth of the city's on-duty force, battled the blaze at its height, said Katherine Main, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles City Fire Department.

Although the cause was not immediately known, city arson investigators, assisted by agents of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, were "going to treat it as if it's a criminal fire until proven otherwise," Fire Captain Jamie Moore told reporters.

He said that the size of the conflagration, as well as the speed and intensity with which it spread, gave investigators cause for concern that it may have been intentionally set.

The site that burned - two stories of poured concrete beneath five floors of wood framing - occupied an entire city block near the junction of two major traffic arteries - the Hollywood Freeway and the Harbor Freeway.

Moments after the first alarm, firefighters whose station is located at the end of the block emerged to see the entire development, measuring 1.3 million square feet (121,000 sq meters), engulfed in flames, Moore said.

"They opened the doors, and they saw fire from one end to the other," he said, adding it was rare for such a large site to go up in flames so swiftly, especially since the exposed lumber would still have been damp from two days of rain late last week.

Much of the structure, wrapped in scaffolding, collapsed in the flames, producing heat so intense it ignited three floors of a neighboring 16-story high-rise building, melting telephones, computers and office cubicle partitions, he said.

The radiant heat also blew out windows from two other nearby office buildings, one of them, the Department of Water and Power headquarters two blocks away, raining shards of glass on firefighters working below to cool the structures with water.

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250 firefighters battle massive L.A. blaze