The Burning Book

Fire and Los Angeles, entwined

Even before the catastrophic events of the last week, I’d spent a lot of time thinking about Los Angeles and fire, because I wrote a book about the largest structural fire in the city’s history, the 1986 inferno at downtown’s Central Library. That research made me realize how animate and hungry fire is, how it paces the city silently and perpetually, looking for a chance to feed itself. I decided to post this excerpt from The Library Book to reflect on the potency of fire and the incredible bravery of firefighters—two subjects that are obviously very much on everyone’s mind right now. Thanks for reading, and let’s hope for better news soon.

From THE LIBRARY BOOK, 2018

A few minutes before eleven a.m. on April 29, 1986, a smoke detector in the library set off an alarm. The library telephone operator called the fire department dispatcher, saying, “Bells ringing at Central Library.” Security guards spread out through the building, instructing patrons to leave. No one was particularly panicked. The library’s fire alarm went off all the time, for all sorts of reasons—a cigarette tossed in a wastebasket, the occasional crackpot bomb threat, and, most often, for no reason at all except that it was an old, crotchety alarm system prone to spasms of hyperactivity. For the staff and regular patrons, the fire alarm had come to possess all the shock value of a clown horn. Packing up and leaving the building was so tiresome that some librarians were tempted to hide out in their workrooms and wait for the all-clear. Most of them left their personal belongings behind when they went out for the alarms, assuming they’d be right back

.

Some regular patrons didn’t bother to pack up when they cleared the building. That morning, a real estate broker named Mary Ludwig was in the History Department doing genealogy research. She’d just discovered she was related to a man in Vermont named Hog Howard when the alarm went off. Rather than disturb all her materials, she left them on the reading table, along with a briefcase containing two years’ worth of research notes and headed to the exit. Patrons and staff headed out of the building with a minimum of jostling and rushing. The only person to report a disturbance was an elderly woman who told investigators that a young man with blond hair and a wisp of a mustache had bumped into her as he hurried by. She said he seemed agitated, but he stopped to help her get back on her feet before he dashed out the door.

The building emptied out in just eight minutes, and patrons and staff, a total of about four hundred people, clustered on the sidewalk outside. The sun was inching up in the sky and the pavement was warming. A few librarians used the occasion to light up a Chesterfield, the cigarette of choice among the staff. One librarian, Sylva Manoogian, decided to bide her time in the parking lot so she could keep an eye on her new car. Helene Mochedlover, a Literature librarian who is so devoted to the library that she likes to say she was left on the library doorstep as an infant, chatted with Manoogian and admired her car. Everyone watched with only mild interest as a fire truck rolled up and its crew entered the building on the Fifth Street side. The fire department’s visits to Central Library were as fleeting as they were frequent. Usually, firefighters could take a look around and reset the alarm in just a few minutes. Engine Company 10—EC10, in fire department parlance—did the initial check, and one of the firefighters radioed to the incident chief that there was “nothing showing”; in other words, it was a false alarm. One of the firefighters went to the basement to clear the alarm system, but it refused to reset—it persisted in indicating that it detected smoke. The firefighter assumed the system was malfunctioning, but just to be sure, the crew decided to take another look around. The firefighters didn’t have a map of the building’s snaky corridors and staircases, so they could only inch along. The library was organized around four book “stacks,” a method of library storage invented in 1893 for the Library of Congress. The stacks at Central were narrow, freestanding vertical compartments—essentially, big concrete tubes—that ran from the basement to the ceiling of the second floor. Each stack was divided into seven tiers by shelving made of steel grating. The open weave of the shelves allowed air to circulate up and around the books, which was considered beneficial.

For human beings, though, the stacks were unwelcoming. They were dim and tomblike, as constricted as a chimney. Their walls were solid concrete. Each tier was less than half a floor high, so navigating them involved a lot of stooping and crouching. The ancient wiring couldn’t handle anything brighter than a forty-watt bulb, leaving the stacks in perpetual twilight. Some of the librarians at Central used a handmade version of a miner’s helmet—a hard hat with a flashlight taped to the brim— when they went looking for books in the stacks. Finding anything there was a challenge beyond just the lack of light. The library had been built to accommodate one million books. By this point, there were more than two million books in its collection, so books were piled in stairwells and crannies and corners and stuffed in any opening on the shelves.

Engine Company 9, EC9, also responded to the initial alarm, parking on the Hope Street side of the building. While waiting to hear that the building was clear and the alarm successfully reset, one of EC9’s crew glanced up and noticed light smoke oozing from the east end of the roof. At that same moment, the firefighters from EC10, inside the building, reached the Fiction Department stacks in the northeast quadrant of the building. They saw light smoke threading along a shelf that started with a Robert Coover novel and ended with one by John Fowles. The smoke coiled upward, drifting through the open grating of the shelves like a ghost. The firefighters tried to radio down to the command post to report the smoke, but they heard nothing but static—the three- foot-thick concrete walls of the stacks blocked the radio signal. One of the firefighters finally clambered out of the stacks and found a telephone in the reading room and called down to the command post to report what they had found.

At first, the smoke in the Fiction stacks was as pale as onionskin. Then it deepened to dove gray. Then it turned black. It wound around Fiction A through L, curling in lazy ringlets. It gathered into soft puffs that bobbed and banked against the shelves like bumpers. Suddenly, sharp fingers of flame shot through the smoke and jabbed upward. More flames erupted. The heat built. The temperature reached 451 degrees and the books began smoldering. Their covers burst like popcorn. Pages flared and blackened and then sprang away from their bindings, a ream of sooty scraps soaring on the updraft. The fire flashed through Fiction, consuming as it traveled. It reached for the cookbooks. The cookbooks burned up. The fire scrambled to the sixth tier and then to the seventh. Every book in its path bloomed with flame. At the seventh tier, the fire banged into the concrete ceiling, doubled back, and mushroomed down again to the sixth tier. It poked around, looking for more air and fuel. Paper and book jackets and microfilm and magazines crumpled and vanished. On the sixth tier, flames crowded against the stacks’ walls, then decided to move laterally. The fire burned through sixth-tier shelves and then nosed around until it found the catwalk that connected the northeast stacks to the northwest stacks. It erupted into the catwalk and hurried along until it reached the patent collection stored in the northwest stacks. It gripped the blocky patent gazettes. They were so thick that they resisted, but the heat gathered until the gazettes smoked, flared, crackled, and dematerialized. Wind gusts filled the vacuum made by the fire. Hot air saturated the walls. The floor began to fracture. A spiderweb of hot cracks appeared. Ceiling beams spalled, sending chips of concrete shooting in every direction. The temperature reached 900 degrees, and the stacks’ steel shelves brightened from gray to white, as if illuminated from within. Soon, glistening and nearly molten, they glowed cherry red. Then they twisted and slumped, pitching their books into the fire.

The two fire companies inside the building connected their equipment to the standpipes and headed into the stacks, but their biggest hoses, swollen stiff with water, couldn’t make the sharp turns in the tight stairways. Dean Cathey, one of the captains on duty, remembered tugging hoses that wouldn’t budge. The firefighters traded them for smaller, more nimble hoses. The thinner stream of water from the small hoses sizzled and evaporated in the flames. In the stacks, with their open grid of shelving, the fire rose up while the water flooded down. Firefighters tossed salvage covers on the shelves, hoping to protect the books from the fury of fire and water. The battalion chief, Donald Cate, alerted City Hall and the head of the fire department, Donald Manning, that an emergency was unfolding at the library. EC9 and EC10 were overwhelmed. Engine companies around the city were mustered. By eleven thirty a.m., an additional eight command officers and twenty-two fire companies in full firefighting turnouts and breathing apparatus assembled at Fifth and Flower. An ambulance parked on Hope Street. When the fire proved too much even for this larger team, Cate called for more help. Within an hour, the force grew to include sixty firefighter companies, nine ambulances, three helicopters, two emergency air units, 350 firefighters, and one arson unit—in total, more than half the fire department resources in the entire city of Los Angeles. Donald Manning arrived at the library. He worried that the department would be caught short if another major fire occurred in the city, so he asked the county fire department to field calls for the city while the library was burning. By this time the fire in the library was spreading fluidly, like spilled ink. The fire department spokesperson, Tony DiDomenico, watched from the sidewalk on Fifth Street. Talking to one reporter, he sounded worried: “Once that first stack got going, it was ‘Goodbye, Charlie.’ ”

In the physics of fire, there is a chemical phenomenon known as a stoichiometric condition, in which a fire achieves the perfect burning ratio of oxygen to fuel—in other words, there is exactly enough air available for the fire to consume all of what it is burning. Such a ratio creates an ideal fire situation, which results in total, perfect combustion. A stoichiometric condition is almost impossible to create outside of a laboratory. It requires such an elusive, precise balance of fuel and fire and oxygen that, in a sense, it is more theoretical than actual. Many firefighters have never seen such a blaze and never will. Not long ago, I had coffee with a man named Ron Hamel. He is now an arson investigator, but at the time of the library fire, Hamel was a captain in the fire department. Although over thirty years have passed, he remains awed by what he saw that day at the library. He talked about it like someone might talk about seeing a UFO. In his decades with the department, Hamel fought thousands of fires, but he said he never experienced another that was as extraordinary as the fire at Central Library. Usually, a fire is red and orange and yellow and black. The fire in the library was colorless. You could look right through it, as if it were a sheet of glass. Where the flame had any color, it was pale blue. It was so hot that it appeared icy. Hamel said he felt like he was standing inside a blacksmith’s forge. “We thought we were looking at the bowels of hell,” he said, tapping on his coffee mug. “Combustion that complete is almost impossible to achieve, but in this case, it was achieved. It was surreal.” Frank Borden, who now runs the Los Angeles Fire Department Museum, once said to me, “In every firefighter’s career, there are those fires that are extraordinary and unforgettable. This was one of those.”

The people on the sidewalk outside the library saw the hurried gathering of fire equipment and then noticed the smoke. The boredom of a false alarm snapped into shock. Michael Leonard, who worked in the library’s public relations department, ran to a nearby photography store and told the cashier he needed every roll of film in stock. Back at the library, he took pictures of the building and the smoke scrolling out of the upper windows, but he couldn’t bring himself to take pictures of the librarians, who were watching the fire in anguish. Some of them were crying. Sylva Manoogian told me she could smell the syrupy odor of microfilm burning. She said that as she stood watching the building burn, a charred page floated down to the sidewalk, and she recalled that it was from a book called God Is Judging You.

Wyman Jones was not at Central Library that morning. Jones was in charge of all seventy-three libraries in the city as well as Central Library; his title was city librarian of Los Angeles and his office was on the fourth floor of the Goodhue Building. That morning, he was at the Hollywood branch library, speaking at the launch of a new literacy program. Jones had been city librarian since 1970. He was a tall, ornery Missourian, a jazz pianist, a skilled amateur magician, and the kind of person who liked to have two cigarettes going at the same time. He supervised the construction of more than a dozen new libraries at his previous posts. He came to Los Angeles hoping to tear down Central Library and replace it with a more modern structure, but he grudgingly agreed to renovate and expand it instead. He liked to say that California was a mess, and Los Angeles was a mess, and the library was a mess, but that somehow, he would make the best of it. As soon as the event at the branch in Hollywood ended, Jones left to head back to his office at Central Library. On the way to his car, he bought a chili dog from a street vendor to eat while driving downtown. He got behind the wheel of his car, turned on the radio, unwrapped his chili dog, heard the news that the library was on fire, threw the chili dog out the window, and sped downtown.

Police shut down a section of the Harbor Freeway, and Sixth, Fifth, Hope, Flower, and Grand Streets, and traffic knotted up around the city. The crowd in front of the library grew. Television and radio reporters lined up, waiting for any word. Inside, the fire was roaring into its third hour. The air in the building was blistering. Water sprayed on the fire boiled like a kettle put on for tea. The runoff from the hoses pooled in the basement and was already fifty inches deep. It was so hot in the building that fire- fighters couldn’t bear it for long; they took breaks every few minutes so their core temperature could come back down to normal. Because they were breathing so heavily, their supplementary oxygen bottles, which ordinarily last an hour, were depleted in ten minutes. Steam from the boiling water percolated through the firefighters’ heavy flameproof coats. Their ears and wrists and knees were scorched. Their lungs became crisp with smoke. Over the course of the day, fifty of them suffered burns, smoke inhalation, or respiratory distress so extreme that they were taken to a nearby hospital for treatment. One firefighter was removed by helicopter from the roof because he was too ill to go back through the fire to exit. All of the firefighters eventually recovered, but the number of casualties was the highest in a single incident that the city’s Emergency Services Bureau ever handled. As the day went on, it began to seem like the fire might eat the library alive. The compressed space of the stacks made it more like a ship fire than a building fire—it was suffocating, ferocious, feeding on itself.

Even though a firestorm was exploding inside, the library didn’t look distressed if you viewed it from the street. The stucco was smooth and undisturbed. The limestone facing of the outer walls was cool as satin. The statuary gazed sightlessly into the middle distance. The windows glanced and glittered in the sunlight. It was quiet. Except for the pale trickle of smoke from the roof, you might not have known anything was amiss. Then, suddenly, with a bright, hard snap, the windows on the west side of the library exploded and the red arms of flame punched outward and upward, slapping at the stone facade. One of the library commissioners watching from the sidewalk burst into tears. The librarians watching from the sidewalk recoiled. One said she felt like she was watching a horror movie. According to librarian Glen Creason, the breeze was filled with “the smell of heartbreak and ashes.” In the building, the air began to quiver with radiant heat. Crews trying to make their way into the stacks felt like they were hitting a barricade, as if the heat had become solid. “We could only stand it for ten, fifteen seconds,” one of them told me. “Then we hotfooted out of there.” The temperature reached 2000 degrees. Then it rose to 2500. The firefighters began to worry about a flashover, a dreaded situation during a fire in which everything in a closed space—even smoke—becomes so hot that it reaches the point of spontaneous ignition, causing a complete and consuming eruption of fire from every surface. As firefighters put it, it’s the moment when a fire in a room is transformed into a room on fire. With the temperature as high as it was, there was a great potential for flashover, which would have made the chance of saving anything nearly impossible.

The main body of the fire moved on, traveling three hundred feet along the second floor of the library, then stopping to lap at the catwalk leading to the southeast stack. The crews attacked it from the west side, taking fifteen-minute turns on the hose lines, hitting the fire again and again with a heavy jet of water. A salvage team battered the walls with sledgehammers, breaching the stifling tube of the stacks. The superheated air flooded out of the stacks into the reading rooms, like heat spilling out of an open oven door. The sixth and seventh tiers of shelving in the northwest stacks collapsed. The water dumped on the fire was now as much a problem as a solution. Many of the books that hadn’t burned were waterlogged. Their covers and pages bulged like balloons. Salvage crews pushed their way through the building in advance of the hose teams, throwing plastic sheeting over the shelves, doing their best to protect the books before the spraying began. On the third floor, Heavy Utility Company 27 jack-hammered a series of eighteen holes through the concrete to vent some of the terrible heat.

Finally, after over five hours, the liquid spill of flames slowed, yielding to the torrents of water and to the cool air that was wafting through the holes jackhammered through the ceiling and floors. The fire pulled back from the southeast section of the building and curled up in the northeast stacks, where it glowered angrily, feeding itself book after book, a monster snacking on chips. Fire crews punched more holes—in the third floor, in the walls of the stacks, in the roof. The fresh April air mingled with the smothering heat inside, easing the temperature down bit by bit. As the fire shrank, firefighters dug deeper and drenched it.

The flames in the northwest stacks withered and went out.

The fire in the northeast stacks, where it had begun, still smoldered, but it no longer had the fierceness it had earlier in the day: By this point it had burned through most of its fuel. The books in the northeast stacks were crumbles, ashes, powder, and charred pages heaped a foot deep. The last flags of fire fluttered, seethed, settled, and finally died. It required 1,400 bottles of oxygen; 13,440 square feet of salvage covers; two acres of plastic sheeting; ninety bales of sawdust; more than three million gallons of water; and the majority of the city of Los Angeles’s firefighting personnel and equipment, but the library fire was at last declared extinguished, “a knockdown,” at six thirty p.m. on April 29, 1986. It had raged for seven hours and thirty-eight minutes.

What was lost: A volume of Don Quixote from 1860, illustrated by French printmaker Gustave Doré. All of the books about the Bible, Christianity, and church history. All biographies of subjects H through K. All American and British plays. All theater history. All Shakespeare. Ninety thousand books about computers, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, seismology, engineering, and metallurgy. All of the unbound manuscripts in the Science Department. A book by architect Andrea Palladio from the 1500s. Five and a half million American patent listings dating from 1799, with drawings and descriptions. All Canadian patent material from approximately the same period. Forty-five thousand works of literature, authors A through L. A leaf from a 1635 Coverdale Bible, which was the first complete translation in modern English. The entire collection of the Jane’s annuals for aircraft, dating back several decades. Nine thousand business books. Six thousand magazines. Eighteen thousand social science books. A first edition of Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking-School Cook Book from 1896. Twelve thousand cookbooks, including six books of popcorn recipes. All of the art periodicals and every single art book printed on glossy paper, which dissolves into a gluey mush when exposed to water. Every ornithology book. Three quarters of all the library’s microfilm. The information labels on twenty thousand photographs, which fell off when they got wet. Any book accidentally shelved in the sections that burned; we will never know what they were, so we cannot know what we are missing. In total, four hundred thousand books in Central Library were destroyed in the fire. An additional seven hundred thousand were badly damaged by either smoke or water or, in many cases, both. The number of books destroyed or spoiled was equal to the entirety of fifteen typical branch libraries. It was the greatest loss to any public library in the history of the United States.