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About that Huge Fire Earlier this Week that Left 3 Firefighters Injured
One of LAist's Featured Photo contributors on Wednesday morning was at home when he heard a loud explosion and felt his home shake. As bcmacsac1 (that's his Flickr name) explains...
A loud Expolsion KA-BOOOM .....About 12:40am shook my house in South L.A. About 4 miles east of me I saw a orange glow in the sky and my son and I grabbed our cameras and headed toward the glow. A warehouse owned by L. A. United Alloys was on fire and it was full of titanium. The more the fire dept. soaked the place with water the more intense the flames got, some times a bright white. After being there for about 2 1/2 hr. I left and got out of my truck to walk back into my house and KA-BOOM-KA-BOOOM again. This time there were injuries. The two blast back to back showered firefighters and engines with molten bits of titanium. The concussion of the blast knocked out some of the windows of the fire vehicles. Hey I tip my hat to yall. You FIRE EXTINGUISHERS do a gr8 job
More than 200 firefighters responded to the city block-long blaze at 761 East Slauson Avenue in South L.A. shortly on Tuesday evening at 11:43 p.m. Shortly after arriving, firefighters decided to pull out of the building and attack the fire from the outside. Good idea. "As a result of these explosions, titanium chips dispersed over the neighborhood," Battalion Chief Mario Rueda told the Associated Press. "Large chunks of concrete impacted some of our apparatus and the concussive effect knocked out some of our (vehicle) windows."
Of the injured firefighters, "two sustained small but severe burns to their hands, one of which also had burns to his ears and low oxygen saturation," according to the LAFD blog. "The third firefighter injured his ear drums. All three were treated at local hospitals."
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