Major emergency fire erupts in downtown LA

Fire rips through DTLA commercial building

A sports appeal store was destroyed in a blaze that erupted on the morning on Friday, April 5.

LOS ANGELES - Los Angeles City firefighters knocked down a major emergency fire that erupted at a commercial building in the Fashion District in downtown Los Angeles on Friday morning.

Officials with the Los Angeles Fire Department said the fire was reported around 5:10 a.m. in the 1400 block of South Main Street.

The LAFD declared the blaze a major emergency fire around 7 a.m., which is essentially the top tier of emergencies for the department.

LAFD officials said the roof of the business partially collapsed part way through the incident, and firefighters maintained their strategy, waited for the rest to collapse and gave hose streams a straight shot at the burning materials beneath.

Thick smoke could be seen for miles as the fire hit new pockets of fuel. The owner said the business was a wholesale t-shirt manufacturing and distribution company.

A major emergency fire ignited in downtown Los Angeles on Friday, April 5.

"We have approximately 120 firefighters on scene. They tried to do an aggressive interior attack initially, but due to the amount of material in the inside, we went to a defensive posture. We backed off a couple of times but obviously, there’s still a lot of material in the inside," said David Ortiz, LAFD’s Public Information Officer.

He added firefighters prevented the fire from spreading to neighboring buildings.

Overall,it took the crew 4 hours and 12 minutes to extinguish the flames. However, much of the debris within the rubble contains extremely hot spots that will need to be uncovered by LAFD Heavy Equipment.