![]() ![]() Subsequent articles focused on the fire’s impact on film festivals, which relied on prints from Universal’s library. The New York Times reported that “a vault full of video and television images” had burned up, but added that “in no case was the destroyed material the only copy of a work,” a claim attributed to Universal Studios officials. But nearly all news outlets characterized the vault fire as a close call, in which worst cases were averted. The fire made news around the world, and the destruction of the video vault featured prominently in the coverage. “Just a huge blob of fire that flowed and flowed.” “It was like watching molten lava move through the building,” Aronson remembers. They rained water from the tops of ladders they doused the building with foam fire retardant. The vault lay near Park Lake, a man-made body of water that appeared in the classic B-movie “Creature From the Black Lagoon.” Fire crews began drafting water from the lake. There were at least a dozen fire engines ringing the vault, and as Aronson looked around he noticed one truck whose parking lights seemed to be melting. Fire was blasting out of the building as if shot from giant flamethrowers. when he gained access to the lot and made his way to the vault. When he turned onto the Hollywood Freeway, he saw clouds of greenish-black smoke pouring into the sky. A few minutes later, the air picked up a harsh scent: the acrid odor of the fire, riding the early-morning breeze into Santa Clarita, roughly 20 miles from the backlot. It was a sound-recordings library, the repository of some of the most historically significant material owned by UMG, the world’s largest record company.Īronson let the phone call go to voice mail, but when he listened to the message, he heard sirens screaming in the background and the frantic voice of a colleague: “The vault is on fire.”Īronson dressed and steered his car to Interstate 5. But Aronson’s domain was a separate space, a fenced-off area of 2,400 square feet in the southwest corner of the building, lined with 18-foot-high storage shelves. About two-thirds of the building was used to store videotapes and film reels, a library controlled by Universal Studios’s parent company, NBCUniversal. The term “video vault” was in fact a misnomer, or a partial misnomer. In practice, this meant he spent his days overseeing an archive housed in the video vault. His title was senior director of vault operations at Universal Music Group (UMG). Aronson had worked on the Universal lot for 25 years. Shortly after the fire broke out, a 50-year-old man named Randy Aronson was awakened by a ringing phone at his home in Canyon Country, Calif., about 30 miles north of Universal City, the unincorporated area of the San Fernando Valley where the studio sits. To backlot workers, it was known as the video vault. The warehouse was nondescript, a hulking edifice of corrugated metal, but it was one of the most important buildings on the 400-acre lot. ![]() But the fire crews were hindered by low water pressure and damaged sprinkler systems and by intense radiant heat gusting between combustible structures.Įventually the flames reached a 22,320-square-foot warehouse that sat near the King Kong Encounter. Hundreds of firefighters responded, including Universal Studios’ on-site brigade. ![]() It burned two sides of Courthouse Square, a set featured in “Back to the Future.” It spread south to a cavernous shed housing the King Kong Encounter, an animatronic attraction for theme-park visitors. It engulfed the backlot’s famous New York City streetscape. ![]() But the roof remained hot, and some 40 minutes after the workers left, one of the hot spots flared up. and, following protocol, kept watch over the site for another hour to ensure that the shingles had cooled. That night, maintenance workers had repaired the roof of a building on the set, using blowtorches to heat asphalt shingles. At 4:43 a.m., a security guard at the movie studio and theme park saw flames rising from a rooftop on the set known as New England Street, a stretch of quaint Colonial-style buildings where small-town scenes were filmed for motion pictures and television shows. The fire that swept across the backlot of Universal Studios Hollywood on Sunday, June 1, 2008, began early that morning, in New England. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |