Fire Lt. Herschel Wadley (at left) thought he was bringing his crew to another middle-of-the-night false alarm. Instead they arrived to find close to 300 visitors — including Korean filmmaker Eunjae Lee (top photo) and economists from around the country — streaming groggily out of the Omni Hotel.
Wadley’s crew would end up staying at the downtown hotel well into Friday morning to mop up a two-alarm fire.
Guests spent about an hour and a half at the park across the Omni on Temple, wrapped in blankets and sipping coffee and tea provided by the hotel. They returned to their rooms by 4 a.m. No guests were hurt; two firefighters were reported treated for minor injuries. Investigators Friday were looking into the cause of the blaze and assessing the damage, which appeared contained to top floors.
The fire started in the kitchen of John Davenport’s restaurant on the Omni’s penthouse 19th floor. As flames spread, the hotel’s emergency system kicked in. A loud recording woke up the guests, who took the stairs to the ground floor and out onto Temple Street. At first they gathered in front of the Playwright bar and other businesses to watch firefighters swing into action; they were then directed into the pedestrian park in the middle of the block that connects the Omni to the Shubert theater and College Street.
Omni marketing director Teresa Goldsmith (pictured) said the hotel was 92 percent full. All made it out safely, she reported. “Our systems worked beautifully,” she said. “Our processes worked beautifully.” Goldsmith said she didn’t know when the penthouse restaurant would reopen. The hotel blocked off access to it Friday morning.
Five separate conferences are taking place at the Omni Friday, according to Goldsmith. All are expected to proceed as scheduled.
The largest of the conferences, organized by the Economic History Association, was titled “The Engines of Growth: Innovation, Creative Destruction, and Human Capital Accumulation.” That’s what brought Gavin and Cathe Wright (pictured) to the Omni.
When the alarm first woke them, said Cathe, who’s a substitute teacher in the Palo Alto, Cal., schools, “it was very frightening,”
Especially “considering what day it was,” added Gavin, who teaches economics at Stanford.
But no one panicked, they and other guests reported. They were full of praise for how the hotel and the fire department handled the situation.
“You had a couple hundred economists [in the street at 2 a.m.] milling around in their bathroom pajamas,” Gavin noted. “It was an unusual experience.” (The Wrights lived in New Haven 40 years ago, when Gavin was a Yale grad student and Cathe taught at the old Lee High School.)
The elevators were working when guests were allowed back in. The Wrights chose to take the stairs back up to the 14th floor.
With the hotel restaurant closed, the Omni put out a free breakfast spread in the lobby Friday morning for the bleary-eyed guests. Filmmaker Eunjae Lee sat with Sunnie Lee (not a relation). They’re staying at the Omni to visit Sunnie’s son, a Yale sophomore. Eunjae is making a documentary about him. The overnight fire provided an opportunity to capture some unexpected dramatic footage.
Long Night
Lt. Wadley was in charge of the Olive Street station when the alarm came in. Typically, he said, these overnight calls turn out to be false alarms or system malfunctions. However, he brought three companies to the scene just in case. “You always want to respond as though it’s serious.”
Which it turned out to be in this case. A police sergeant greeted Wadley and informed him, “There’s a fire on the 19th floor in the kitchen area. The cleaning guy is up there trying to put the fire out with a kitchen hose.”
Upstairs, it looked at first as though “the sprinklers were doing the job,” said Wadley. “However, as you stood there, you could see an orange glow above the ceiling. We pulled the tiles. [The fire] was roaring.”
He called in a signal 73 (“working fire”). More firefighters arrived. They pulled down the drop ceiling and fought the blaze for at least 40 minutes until it was under control. Then they checked to see if the fire had spread elsewhere in the hotel. “Any time fire gets into the duct work, it can travel,” Wadley said. Fortunately, the fire took place on the hotel’s top floor, so it hadn’t migrated.
A single engine remained outside the Omni during rush hour, as a few firefighters (including Mike Mineri, pictured in foreground) mopped up and investigators began inspecting the building for clues.