A fire erupted Tuesday afternoon in an abandoned Franklin Boulevard garage, blanketing the University campus with smoke and stopping traffic on the street for more than an hour.
Eugene Fire Department District Chief Lance Lighty said just before 4 p.m. the department had yet to discover the cause of the fire, which started on the site of a former auto body shop. He said, however, that the department did not believe anyone had been in the building. No further information was available as of press time.
Employees at Louie’s Village, a Chinese restaurant next door to the site, were the first to notice the fire before 3 p.m., when smoke began billowing into its dining room. They rushed customers out and called the fire department, and said they would likely close the restaurant for the day.
“Our building is totally smoked,” said Gene Louie, the restaurant’s owner.
Smoke soon engulfed parts of the University, scattering pedestrians on East 13th Avenue who walked east to avoid the smoke. It crept into classrooms on the north end of campus.
“I could smell the smoke from Allen Hall,” junior Edward Tsoi said. Later he added, “We were all getting dizzy and coughing.”
Sophomore Howard Wang said his professor cancelled his class in 162 Lillis to escape the smoke. “The instructor thought it was something happening in our class, so he phoned the administration and we had a break.”
Meanwhile, more than 100 onlookers gathered along the median and sidewalk in front of the Holiday Inn across the street, snapping photos and recording videos, and covering their faces with lapels when the wind changed direction to blow smoke across the street.
Louie’s brother climbed to the roof of the restaurant with a garden hose to guard against the possibility of winds changing to blow the blaze into the restaurant.
Firefighters arrived on the scene at 2:51 p.m., Lighty said. They stretched firehoses across the six-lane street from the hotel and parked a ladder truck alongside the building.
“Our game plan was to apply a lot of water right away,” Lighty said. Firefighters began drenching the garage from above with the ladder-truck’s hose.
“Then the roof collapsed,” said freshman David Lee, who said he began watching soon after the firefighters arrived.
By then, the blaze had spread from one of the building’s garages to a boarded-up brick building with a wood frame alongside. Lighty said homeless people sometimes sleep inside the building, but when fire crews entered they found no one inside.
Police blocked off traffic along Franklin Boulevard, and traffic diverted along East 11th Avenue slowed to a crawl, with many in the cars covering their faces with rags to avoid breathing in the smoke.
After the aerial assault, firefighters attacked the fire on foot with several pressurized hoses. “We got really aggressive with the fire,” Lighty said.
To fight the fire, the department deployed picks and chainsaws to open doors and tear off pieces of the roof. By 3:45 p.m., Lighty said the fire was “contained, but not under control.”
Lighty said he could not estimate the damage that was done to the former site of Asian Import Auto Clinic, and that the department did not yet know the cause. “It’ll take some time to do the investigation.”
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