RIP Kohler Street...Again

(Image courtesy of KCAL News)

Damn it.

Mere weeks ago on July 19, a fire broke out on Kohler Street, destroying two buildings and damaging three others in the 600 and 700 blocks.

When a fire broke out two days ago, the address was tentatively listed as 648 Kohler Street. The building is at the corner of Kohler and Industrial Street, and the actual address was later confirmed to be 1200 Industrial Street.

There's nothing special about 1200 Industrial Street. It's a completely ordinary single-story industrial property built in 1978 and converted from a warehouse to a candy factory in 2012. It didn't even have a single LADBS complaint on file until yesterday. I doubt it matters to anyone but the building's owner.

The problem is, fires spread.

And guess what's RIGHT NEXT DOOR to 1200 Industrial Street?

The "three story apartment building" in the news stories is the Olympia Hotel. It's an SRO building last owned by the collapsed Skid Row Housing Trust. According to KCAL, residents were told to shelter in place.

No one was hurt, but it could have been MUCH worse.

According to LAFD, "Though the building appeared vacant and secured, [sic] (yet to be fully determined) contents included pressurized gas cylinders [sic] (undetermined contents), that ruptured during the blaze, leading [sic] the explosions heard shortly after LAFD arrival."

(No word yet on what kind of pressurized gas was in those cylinders, but highly pressurized carbon dioxide is used to make candies like Pop Rocks, and the building was a candy factory.)

While I'm glad no one was hurt, there WAS a knockdown fire punctuated by multiple explosions, and the Olympia Hotel COULD HAVE gone up in flames, too. Which would have dire consequences for its very-low-income residents.

1200 Industrial Street, Skid Row.