Justin Bellace

3/3/14
FST 220

Location: One Meridian Plaza
One Meridian Plaza was a thirty-eight floor office building at the corner of 15
th
Street and
South Penn Square in Center City, Philadelphia, PA. It was designed by architect Vincent King
& Associates. The construction started in 1968 and cost $40 million to make. The construction
ended in 1972. It was demolished in 1999 due to fire damage as a result of a fire on February 23,
1991. The tower was 243 ft. long by 92 ft. wide by 492 ft. tall. Thirty-six floors of the building
were occupied and the other two were used for mechanical purposes. It was composed of steel
and concrete and it had a granite curtain wall. It also had to helicopter pads on the roof. When
this high rise was being built the city of Philadelphia was enforcing building code from 1949
which didnt distinguish high rises from regular buildings. Only seven
floors total had full automatic sprinkler protect and they were the three
floors underground and then four additional floors in the building. This
is one of the main reasons the fire spread so rapidly.

Fire date and cause: The fire was on February 23, 1991. The
determined cause of the fire we rags soaked with linseed oil self-
ignited on the twenty-second floor. The call came in around 8:20 pm.
That night was a Saturday night and there were only three people in the entire building. There
were many problems that led up to this fire. For one, workers earlier that day left a pile of linseed
soaked rags in a pile and then left. The linseed oil in those rags then oxidized and gave off
enough heat to self-ignite and ended up spreading to other materials and causing the fire to be
well involved. Secondly there were not smoke-detectors throughout the entire floor so by the
time the alarm went off the fire was already well involved.

Resources:
Squirts-4 (43, 8, 57, 9) Battalion Chiefs-11 (5, 4, 3, 11, 1, 8, 2, 10, 1102, 13, 9)
Engines-47 (1, 20, 11, 10, 24, 44, 13, 49, 40, 60, 5, 29, 16, 3, 34, 33, 27, 53, 25, 12, 22, 50, 59,
63, 14, 28, 61, 56, 41, 38, 66, 45, 68, 72, 18, 7, 2, 71, 35, 103, 119, 125, 181, 36, 52, 180, 19)
Ladders-9 (9, 23, 1, 11, 13, 18, Tower Ladder 6, 25, 14) Snorkel-1 (5)
Medic-9 (7, 13, 21B, 25B, 3, 16, 1, 15, 14) Division Chief-2 (1, 1A)
Air Unit-1 (2) Chemical Unit-3 (1, 2, ES-10 Decontamination Trailer)
Car-2 (1, 6) Light Wagon-1 (1) Rescue-1 (1 [reactivated for incident])
Thats seventy-eight pieces of apparatus excluding the Battalion Chiefs and Division Chiefs.
This was a twelve alarm fire. This was the first fire in Philadelphia where they used helicopters.
They used PennStar to help get firefighter to the roof of the building. And on top of all these
apparatus there were over 300 firemen on the scene.
Problems:
This building gave the fire companies many problems. When the firefighters got to floor eleven
of the building, it had no power. The power was lost due to the fact that the radiant heat from the
fire damaged electric cables. Another reason why the building had no power was because of the
fact that the emergency generator never kicked in to start producing power. The building was
without power for the entire duration of the fire call. This forced the firemen to work in the dark
and they didnt have the use of the elevator. Seeing as the building was constructed with no
sprinklers because the city was using codes from 1949 which didnt distinguish high rises from
anything else. But in 1984, Philadelphia got new codes which required automatic sprinklers to be
in all buildings. When the building was built there were only sprinklers in the basement levels.
But in 1988 they planned to put sprinklers throughout the building by 1993. As I have stated
before, only seven floors out of the total thirty-eight floor building. Which really sucks from a
fire protection standpoint. If this entire building had automatic sprinklers, this fire wouldnt have
gotten so out of hand. The pressure release valves were installed improperly when they were
installed in the building. And this brings us to our next problem, inadequate water pressure from
the standpipes. That inadequate water pressure is a reason why the firemen couldnt get a real
good knock on the fire. It took many hours before a sprinkler technician came to adjust those
pressure release valves.
There is always a downside that these major problems will cause. Captain David P.
Holcombe, FF Phyllis McAllister, and FF James A. Chappell lost their lives in this fire. These
three firefighters were part of Engine 11 and were ordered to ventilate the stairwell. They went
up the staircase in the center of the building from the twenty-second floor and then soon they
radioed that they started to get disorientated by the heavy smoke coming from the thirtieth floor.
There were several attempts to try and direct the team via their radio but soon the captain sent
out a request for permission to ventilate a window. But was then followed by a message saying
that Captain David P. Holcombe was down. Permission was given to ventilate the window and
then search and rescue efforts were underway.
Rescue teams then started to search for the three firemen and couldnt find them. The
teams moved to upper levels but when they reached the thirty-eighth floor, one team ran out of
air in their SCBA. That team was rescued by a search team that were dropped off on the roof by
a helicopter. Attempts to rescue continued until the helicopter was unable to help because of
heavy smoke and thermal drafts from the fire. The helicopter crew used a searchlight to try and
due an exterior search of the building. A little after 1:00 am on the 24
th
of February the exterior
search operation spotted the broken window that the team of Holcombe, McAllister, and
Chappell were permitted to ventilate on the twenty-eight floor. At about quarter after two in the
morning a rescue team was sent to the floor where the helicopter spotted the window and found
the three missing firemen. They were all unconscious and had no air in their SCBA. The three
firefighters were brought to the triage on the twentieth floor. Attempts to revive the firemen were
made but they were then pronounced dead.
And after the fires sixth hour of burning it started to spread to the twenty-sixth floor. The
building was completely evacuated by about 7:30 am. The only suppression efforts that were left
were streams coming from the neighboring Girard Trust Building and One Centre Square. There
were concern that structural damage that was observed might cause the floors to collapse. The
spread of the fire stopped once it reached the thirtieth floor because the sprinklers kicked in and
prevented and spread of the fire. Being contained by the sprinklers, the fire was running out of
fuel and was declared under control at 3:00 pm. This fire lasted a total of nineteen hours and
destroyed eight floors. At the end, three firemen are dead, twenty-four were injured. This fire
caused an estimated $100 million in property loss.
The building was left vacant after the fire and
remained there for eight years after the fire. This building
was declared Eyesore of the Year by The Philadelphia
Inquire in 1994. According to an editorial in The Inquire it
was an embarrassment to the city. But the feeling towards the
vacant building only became worse when it could be seen in the background of the film
Philadelphia. Property values fell and businesses went out of business because of the building.
The building was unable to be imploded so workers began a $23 million process to dismantle the
vacant building. This lasted until 1999.


Bibliography:
High-rise Office Building Fire One Meridian Plaza Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
http://www.interfire.org/res_file/pdf/Tr-049.pdf .FEMA Web. 05 Mar. 2014.
"One Meridian Plaza." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 16 Feb. 2014. Web. 05 Mar.
2014.