Madrid office building on fire

2005-02-13 09:03

Madrid - A raging fire engulfed the upper floors of a 32-storey office building in downtown Madrid early on Sunday, sending flaming chunks of debris cascading to the ground and consuming the building like a candle.

Huge, bright orange flames shot out the sides and top of the Windsor Building, believed to be empty and located near one of Madrid's main boulevards. Muffled explosions could be heard coming from the building.

The fire started about 23:30 on Saturday and about three hours later the top floors of the building - at least six of them - collapsed in a shower of flaming metal debris. A towering column of black smoke billowed from the structure.

About an hour later another massive chunk crashed to the ground, sending up giant ball of flame.

The cause of the blaze was not immediately known, but emergency services spokesperson Javier Ayuso said firefighters think it might have been a short circuit in the upper half of the edifice.

City officials expressed fears the building might collapse altogether.

"At this point the fire can't be fought and we have to wait," said Pedro Calvo, the town hall official in charge of the fire department and other emergency services.

Ayuso said three firefighters have been treated for smoke inhalation and exhaustion.

At least 70 firefighters battled the blaze, trying to hose down the inferno but the water could not even reach the upper part of the fire.

Crowds watching

They evacuated a nearby apartment building and started hosing down neighboring office buildings to keep the fire from spreading.

Most of the Windsor Building - at 106m high, Madrid's fourth highest - housed offices of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, a multinational financial services company.

Helicopters hovered overhead as hundreds of pedestrians watching from behind police cordons gawked at the spectacle, some using cellphones to take digital pictures.

The fire appeared to have started about three-quarters of the way up the building, initially limited to just one floor which firefighters hosed with high pressure water jets.

Thirty minutes later the floors above had burst into flames, leading to the collapse of the eastern cladding of the building.

From there, one by one the floors below began to catch fire, occasionally causing further collapses of outer cladding.

As the fire burned on into the night, all that was visible of the upper parts of the building was the flaming, gutted remains of steel-reinforced concrete floors.

Construction of the Windsor Building began in 1973 and was completed in 1979. The shiny gold building was a landmark structure in Madrid's business district. The building had been surrounded with scaffolding due to recent repairs and had a large construction crane on the roof.

- AP