Electrical Fire Shuts Down Offices/Retail Center

The smell of a small electrical fire still permeated the Hermosa Pavilion building, at 1601 Pacific Coast Highway, hours after the mid-morning incident Tuesday forced the evacuation of approximately 100 people inside the retail office center.

"I wasn't really scared," said Jinna Park, who works at the CJ Grand Spa in the building. "I didn't see the fire, just smelled the smoke."

She said that around 10:45 a.m., a man entered the spa and said that there was a fire. Park said that she couldn't see any sign of it, but when she opened the door to the spa, she could smell the smoke. About five minutes after that, she said, she was asked to evacuate the spa.

"We had one customer," she said. "I couldn't go in [to the back area] because it was a man."

According to City of Hermosa Beach Building Inspector Arthur Rayburn, the cause of the fire was overheating wires that eventually melted through their casings and began arcing, sparking the fire.

"It's just old age," Rayburn said about the parts that failed. 

He said that the entire building had been evacuated for safety's sake, although the damage was confined to electrical panels on the first floor.

"The second story's going to be fine," he said, although businesses on the first floor might be unable to open for as much as a week, depending on what an electrician finds. "What's going on is that we're systematically going through a checklist."

Hermosa Beach resident Harold Anschel said that he was working out at the 24-Hour Fitness facility at the time of the fire when it was evacuated. He returned later in the afternoon to find the facility closed, which presented a problem as he had various personal items that he'd left behind when the gym was evacuated.

"Nobody went out real quick," he said about the evacuation, adding that most of the people in the gym didn't seem to hear the instructions because of headsets plugged into their ears.