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FEARED DEAD IN WAREHOUSE FIRE
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ire crews in California worked into the night Saturday
sifting through the remains of a warehouse gutted by a blaze during a rave
party, with officials saying they fear the death toll could reach 40.
Relatives of dozens of people missing in the Friday
night blaze in Oakland near San Francisco continued their anxious wait for
news. Nine people are confirmed dead so far.
The rickety two-story warehouse was used by artists as
a living and work space but had no license for this, officials said, nor for
the electronic dance party under way when the blaze broke out. The cause was
not yet known.
Firefighters said the building seemed to have no
sprinklers or smoke detectors.
Orange flames shot through the roof as the fire burned
for hours and thick smoke billowed into the sky. The roof collapsed onto the
second floor, which officials said was connected to the ground floor only by a
makeshift system of wooden pallets.
Firefighters had to pull out of the building to shore
it up when part of the fragile structure and some of the walls began to move.
Sergeant Ray Kelly of the Alameda County Sheriff’s
department told an evening news conference that about two dozen people who were
reported missing had been located.
But at least two dozen more remain missing, he said.
“We don’t know how far into the process we are,
because we don’t absolutely have a number of people that we know are deceased
inside of there,” he said.
An official at his office, who declined to be named,
said early Sunday the death toll could rise to 40 or even higher.
Most of those who perished in the blaze that started
about 11:30 pm Friday (0730 GMT Saturday) were thought to have died on the
upper floor of the two-story warehouse known as Oakland Ghost Ship, said
Oakland Fire Chief Teresa Deloach Reed.
“It must have been a very fast-moving fire,” she said.
The electronic dance music party was attended by an
estimated 50 to 100 people.
‘Expecting the worst’
The sheriff’s office station in Oakland became a
center for relatives of the missing. The Salvation Army dropped off 50 meals
for them, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Daniel Vega told the newspaper he is looking for his
brother Alex and his girlfriend, who had said they were going to a rave in
Oakland.
“If he is dead, if he is in the rubble, fine, I’ll get
over it. But I just want to find him,” Vega told the Chronicle.
Some of the missing are from overseas, making
identification of the victims — thought to be in their 20s and 30s — more
difficult.
The warehouse had numerous partitions added to the
original building.
Some of the structural changes made it extremely
difficult for people to escape, Reed said.
“There wasn’t a real entry or exit path,” Reed said.
The clutter hampered firefighters’ efforts to put out
the blaze.
“It was filled end-to-end with furniture, whatnot,
collections,” Reed said. “It was like a maze, almost.”
It appeared no smoke detectors were activated in the
building, which also had no sprinkler system, she added.
Friends and families of partygoers took to social
media to search for news about their loved ones, with some posting information
on the event’s Facebook page.
“Please tell me you are safe,” one woman wrote, adding
a friend’s name, while others posted prayers.
‘Felt my skin peeling’
“I literally felt my skin peeling and my lungs being suffocated
by smoke,” Bob Mule, a photographer who lives in the building, told Fox
television affiliate KTVU.
“I couldn’t get the fire extinguisher to work.”
Another artist told the station that the fire broke
out in the back of the building where some 18 artists shared space.
The man, who was not identified, said he tried to help
a fellow artist who had broken his ankle to flee the inferno, but was
obstructed by the smoke and flames as well as the mess of objects.
“I hope he is OK,” he told the station, his voice
breaking up.
The fire was described as the deadliest incident in
Oakland since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake in northern California, which
killed 63 people.
The deadliest nightclub fire in the United States in
recent decades broke out in 2003, when pyrotechnic effects by the rock band
Great White set off an inferno at The Station nightclub in Rhode Island,
killing about 100 people.
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