A massive fire destroyed an 84,000-square-foot business complex near the Strip on Monday and left a haze of smoke hovering over the central Las Vegas Valley. Also detroyed were the offices of the Nevada Broadcasters Assocition, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Clark County Fire Chief Greg Cassell said no sprinklers had been installed in the two-story structure, and it was unclear if the building’s smoke detectors were working because the Fire Department was never contacted by an alarm monitoring company. The fire was reported by someone staying at a nearby La Quinta Inn & Suites.
When firefighters arrived at the scene around 3 a.m., they found the intersection in front of the complex flooded with smoke, Cassell said. Visibility was reduced to a few hundred feet, and crews initially were not sure which building was on fire.
Cassell said the fire may have started in the building’s common attic, which had no smoke detectors, and could have been burning for hours before anyone noticed.
“You take things for granted,” Mitch Fox, president and CEO of the Nevada Broadcasters Association, said. “We don’t think there’s anything that important in an office, but there’s personal mementos, awards, signed photos, things that can’t be replaced.”
He said the loss of the association’s office was saddening, but his staff is already picking up the pieces and moving forward.
“Think if this had happened 15, 20 years ago, or even just 10 years ago,” he said. “Every business has paper files, but now we have DropBox, the cloud, the internet. We didn’t lose everything.”
Fox said the silver lining of the fire, if there is one, is the support he’s seen from the community. He said he’s received numerous calls from people, including broadcast station managers, county commissioners and Mayor Carolyn Goodman, offering up office space and resources while the association gets back on its feet.
Cassell recommended that all business owners back up their important documents to a cloud server in case of a fire emergency.
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