A car fire under an apartment floor reached the second story in minutes

SOUTH EL MONTE, Calif.

SOUTH EL MONTE, Calif. — A vehicle fire in a ground-level parking bay beneath a residential block in the 3000 block of North Lashbrook Avenue spread into the building and reached the second story, killing one occupant and injuring another, according to the Los Angeles County Fire Department and local reporting.

Crews were dispatched at 9:18 p.m. Firefighters mounted an interior attack and brought the main body of fire under control within about fifteen minutes. One person was extracted from the second floor and died of fire injuries at hospital. A second was treated for major injuries.

County fire inspectors are now reviewing the containment between the external parking ports and the primary structural frame, according to LACoFD spokesman Jonathan Torres.

What is established

Established: a vehicle fire that breached the building envelope, fire that advanced to the second floor, a fifteen-minute knockdown, one fatality and one serious injury, and an inspection review of the separation between the parking area and the residential structure.

Not established: whether the separation was code-compliant when built, whether it had been altered since, and whether the vehicle was a conventional internal-combustion car or something else. Those answers belong to the investigation.

The underside of the floor is the weakest line in the building

An open carport is a convenience with a fire problem built into it: the ceiling of the parking bay is the floor of somebody's home.

A vehicle fire releases energy upward. Its plume is hot and it is directly beneath a horizontal assembly that was never designed as a fire barrier unless it was explicitly built and maintained as one. Where the soffit above parking is combustible, unsealed, or penetrated by pipes, conduits and lighting boxes without proper firestopping, the assembly stops being a barrier and becomes a path.

Fifteen minutes is a fast knockdown by any measure. It was still long enough for the fire to make the second floor, which suggests the failure was not in suppression but in containment.

Why this matters far outside South El Monte

Ground-level parking beneath two and three-story residential buildings is a standard configuration across Southern California and the Sun Belt. It is inexpensive, it satisfies parking minimums, and it keeps vehicles out of the sun.

It also concentrates a fuel load directly under occupied bedrooms, and it does so in a space that is typically open, unstaffed, and exempt from the interior fire protection features that would apply to an enclosed garage.

The inspection question — whether the assembly between the parking bay and the dwelling has the required fire-resistance rating and whether that rating is intact — is a question that can be answered for any of those buildings this week, by the owner, without waiting for a department to ask it.

What an owner or manager should check

• The rating of the assembly above every parking bay, from the drawings, not from memory.
• Every penetration through that assembly: plumbing, electrical, cable, gas. Each should be sealed with a listed firestop, and none should be a hole someone made and forgot.
• The condition of soffits and any combustible cladding exposed to the parking bays.
• Whether anything in the bay other than vehicles is being stored: propane, generators, fuel cans, tires.
• Whether the building has working smoke detection in the dwelling directly above each bay, because that is where a resident's warning comes from.

USPA Nationwide Security posts fire watch crews when a building's alarm, sprinkler or detection systems are impaired, and the South El Monte fire is the case for that discipline: when a system is out of service, a trained person walking the parking bays and stairwells with a log is the only detection the building has.

What tenants can do tonight

Know which bay is under your unit and keep it clear of stored material. If there is a battery charger running unattended beneath a bedroom window, say something to the manager in writing. And confirm that your smoke alarm is not just present but working, because in this configuration the alarm above the fire is often the only notice the household gets.

Related coverage

• In Flagami, the fire took the elevators before it reached the fourth floor
• The e-bike beside the front door turns the only exit into a wall of fire
• When the building has no standpipe, the stairwell becomes the water main

Fire watch for an impaired building: (800) 214-1448 or request emergency fire watch.

The Watchline will follow the county's containment review when the findings are released.