By Bob Strauss
The Daily News of Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES — Plastics in bottles made fire especially smoky, harder to battle.
Water may not burn, but a small warehouse at the Arrowhead Mountain Spring Water office in Chatsworth went up in flames Tuesday morning.
Though the conflagration looked bad and sent a thick plume of black smoke high into the Northwest Valley sky, the fire was knocked down in a quick 29 minutes.
More than 116 firefighters from 20 Los Angeles Fire Department companies responded to the blaze. Of course, the question of the day was whether or not being in a warehouse full of water made the fire easier to fight.
“It actually wasn’t helpful,” explained John Miller, chief of Battalion 17, based in Woodland Hills. “What caused us some concerns was the plastics involved with the storage of the bottles and issues like that. That’s what put up the column of smoke as it did, with the low humidity, straight up in the air.”
The warehouse contained coolers, coffeemakers and other components, Miller added, “so we had additional metal equipment that was involved in the fire.”
The fire caused no injuries to any Arrowhead employees or firefighters. The cause of the blaze and amount of damage — which was limited to the wood-and-stucco warehouse structure and prevented from spreading to an adjacent office building — were still being determined Tuesday afternoon.
Engine 107 from a station a few blocks away on Devonshire Street was the first unit to respond to the 10:28 a.m. alarm on Mason Avenue, just south of Plummer. It was on scene in four minutes.
“One of the things that this identifies is that when you dial 911, your Los Angeles city fire department is going to arrive as quickly as possible to the emergency at hand,” LAFD Public Information Officer Captain Jaime Moore said. “We do everything we can with what we’re given.”
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