The big stories Thursday: two inner-Loop fires, one of which cut electricity to thousands of people and another that potentially endangered workers in a high-rise under construction. Fortunately, no one was injured in either fire, though they both caused headaches for people trying to get around the city.
The first fire broke out at an electrical substation off the Southwest Freeway just before 1 p.m. yesterday, knocking out electricity to about 17,000 customers in the Greenway Plaza, Upper Kirby and Shepherd Drive areas. Investigators say the fire was caused by a faulty transformer, and witnesses said it all started with a pretty big explosion. "It was horrible, you guys," witness Angela Singleton told KTRK. "I was in Discount Tire and the young man was talking to me and all of a sudden we heard this big boom and we saw this orange flame. It just went up in the air, and then we heard a second one, and we saw people running out of the restaurant. I mean, it was horrible." John Daspit, who works in a nearby high-rise, said the fireball "was easily the size of a large building."
Businesses weren't the only things that lost power: When the transformer exploded, traffic lights across the area also went out, causing massive traffic backups on surface streets and the Southwest Freeway. CenterPoint Energy had restored power to all but about 3,000 customers by 3:45 p.m. and to the rest by Thursday evening, a process the company said went faster than it used to because of a new power control system called the Intelligent Grid, which allows for better remote control of the power delivery system during incidents like the fire. "Remotely, you can take the magnitude of the problem down to a more finite area," CenterPoint Vice President Kenny Mercado told KHOU.
Then, later in the afternoon, another fire broke out at a building under construction in the Medical Center, sending dark smoke into the sky around 4:30 p.m. It happened on the roof of a skybridge between the Rotary House and the newly christened T. Boone Pickens Academic Tower, a 21-story building being built by the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. Officials told KTRK that workers high up in the building were using a cutting torch and sparks fell into a pile of roofing material on the skywalk below, igniting it (an M.D. Anderson spokesperson told KHOU that the fire began when crews were heating up roofing material — it's not clear if those are two seemingly different explanations for the same thing or if the source of the fire just wasn't known yesterday).
Firefighters rescued some construction workers on the roof, and a construction elevator on the north side of the building — the side away from the fire — was able to go from floor to floor and evacuate workers on other floors. The skybridge, Rotary House and a nearby M.D. Anderson faculty building were evacuated for safety's sake though the fire never seems to have spread beyond the piles of roofing material.
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