On Aug. 29, 1953, flames caused the collapse of the Central Block in Pueblo, Colorado - a hub of local business - and destroyed the neighboring McCarthy Building.
As the building crumbled, "We started running fast. Don't know where, just fast," said C.C. Wood, a Pueblo fire captain. O.G. Pope, 88, an attorney who had an office and apartment in the red sandstone block, was the sole fatality.
Speaking in a 1990 interview, retired Pueblo firefighter John Mikus said the blaze "was kind of a mixed-up affair. The chiefs weren’t there as they were all at a fire chiefs’ convention. There was a new crew at the Central Station. Since they were new, they shouldn’t have gone out – they didn’t know where everything was. They even hooked onto the wrong plug."
In an interview with the Pueblo Chieftain, photographer William "Bud" Hawkins, who snapped an award-winning photograph of a falling wall, recalled: ”It wasn’t even going good when I got there. I took a lot of pictures and thought it looked like a dry run but then it took off."
Hawkins also observed: "The Central Block was pretty tall and it was built to burn: There were offices all around the outside edge and an oval thing (ground floor-to-roof rotunda) in the middle so you could walk around on all the floors and look down. That was like a flue.”
Writing in Fire Engineering in 2012, Ronald Spadafora, a New York City firefighter, noted "an atrium allows the builder to take advantage of available sunlight and provide enhanced ventilation" but "also provides a horizontal and vertical pathway for fire and the products of combustion."
The Central Block was built in 1890 and the McCarthy Building was built in 1891.
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