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. The librarians always worried more about floods than fire, and now they had both. 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 jackhammered 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 had 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.
3.
What Every Home Owner Needs to Know About Mold and What to Do About It (2003)
By Lankarge, Vicki
693.893 L289
The Preservation of Leather Bookbindings (1894)
By Plenderleith, H. J.
025.7 P725
A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World (2003)
By Basbanes, Nicholas A.
085.1 B297
The Hoppin ’N’ Poppin Popcorn Cookbook (1995)
By Steer, Gina
641.65677 S814
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.
The place stayed hot for five days. Little fires flared up here and there, ignited by the ambient heat. The temperature lingered close to 100 degrees, so firefighters continued to wear protective gear and breathing apparatus and needed to rotate out after ten minutes inside. Immediately after the main blaze was out, crews hurried to “de-water” the basement and main floor. So much water had collected that engineers worried the floors might collapse under the weight. The engineers wanted to cool down the building but couldn’t risk damaging more books with water. They wanted to clear debris to break up hot spots, but Chief Manning instructed them to leave the site undisturbed, to preserve anything investigators might need to help determine what had set it off.
The librarians stayed at the library for the seven and a half hours that the fire blazed, and they stayed after it was put out. As soon as the fire department permitted it, almost all two hundred of them entered the building. Inside, it was filthy, smoky, and slick from water mixed with debris. The ash was ankle-deep. The melted shelving looked grotesque. Wyman Jones declared that the interior of the library looked “like an el cheapo movie set, done by scab special-effects men.” Glen Creason and another librarian, Roy Stone, made their way into the stacks to get a sense of what had survived. They were also looking for Roy’s wife’s handbag; she was a librarian, too, and had left the bag behind when the alarm sounded. They didn’t see the handbag, so Creason and Stone climbed out of the stacks and went to the Patent Room, where they came upon mounds of soot and a long row of molten typewriters. Billie Connor, a children’s librarian, walked through the mess with Helene Mochedlover. Connor and Mochedlover are both retired now, but they still come to the library often, and one day we sat and talked about their experience of the fire. The room we were in happened to be one of the most badly burned and is now a handsomely appointed meeting room. They spoke about the fire as if it had happened earlier that morning. Connor said when they entered the building immediately after the fire, they felt like they’d died and gone to see if Dante knew what he was writing about. Mochedlover, who is birdlike and energetic, said she was as upset the day of the fire as she was the day of President Kennedy’s assassination. Another senior librarian I interviewed that day told me that seeing the library in ruins so traumatized her that she didn’t get her period for the next four months.