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 made of 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. There they saw smoke threading along a shelf of books that started with a Robert Coover novel and ended with one by John Fowles. The smoke began to coil 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 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 bumper cars. 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 roasted. 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. Pages and book jackets and microfilm and magazines crumpled and vanished. On the sixth tier, flames crowded against the walls of the stacks, 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 at last 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 exceptional 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 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.”