A large fire tore through a warehouse in Seattle's SoDo neighborhood overnight, and crews were still mopping up hot spots as the sun came up. What began as a call in the middle of the night grew into a major, multi-alarm operation, with fire engines racing to the scene and lining the street as they worked to keep the flames from spreading any further than they already had.
According to the fire department, the first 911 calls came in around 1 a.m. Investigators say the blaze did not start inside the building itself but in a tractor trailer, from which the flames then spread quickly into the warehouse. That rapid spread inside the structure is what pushed the incident from a routine response into something far more serious in a matter of minutes.
As the fire grew, the Seattle Fire Department upgraded it to a three-alarm blaze, bringing in additional crews and resources. Rather than sending firefighters deep inside the burning warehouse, commanders made the call to pull them back and fight the fire defensively, attacking it from a distance to keep personnel out of the most dangerous areas of the structure.
That decision quickly proved to be the right one. Firefighters say that only about half an hour after they were told to stay back, the roof of the warehouse began to collapse. Had crews been working inside at that point, the situation could have turned deadly, but the defensive posture kept them clear of the falling structure.
Concern about the origin of the fire also shaped the response. Crews could see barrels in the back of the tractor trailer where the flames started, an unknown that gave the department reason for caution. That uncertainty was part of why firefighters were kept at a distance rather than pressing in close to the seat of the fire.
As a further precaution, the Seattle Fire Department sent crews to nearby warehouses to make sure no one was inside or otherwise in harm's way as the fire burned. In an industrial area filled with large storage buildings, checking the surrounding structures was a key part of keeping the incident from claiming any victims.
By morning, the scale of the damage was clear. The fire department, which had a total of 115 personnel on the scene, said the warehouse had been destroyed, its roof charred and partly caved in. Crews were still dumping water on the ruined structure hours later to make sure the fire stayed out, a reminder of just how intense the overnight blaze had been.
As of the latest update, no injuries have been reported. The department issued a smoke advisory for a half-mile radius around the fire, and an acrid smell was still lingering in the air in the morning. With the flames knocked down and crews focused on hot spots, attention now turns to the investigation into how the fire in the tractor trailer began.