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Show JKLMh t 'it,"' . - i'lvi! :? s ; ' I I n ;U , r w.J.. . - 1 CD o j o soiuitaM bums mig TOP A railroad car blistered by the heat. RIGHT The building as it used to be. BELOW LEFT The building build-ing as it looked about 5:30 a.m. Monday. Car can be seen burning in foreground. BELOW RIGHT The second story comes crashing down Monday afternoon. Photos by Stephen Austin and David Hampshire - jr t , ! 1 . aW8 fv i - ; . ; I ' 5nv. . k I : r , 1 ' , ' , ? ; Ml -I i K" - ' , , - A'-". - s v;- rr : I if .-s jk ): If Coalition from 1 with which the flames took over the building. I can't understand how a building could be so completely engulfed in flame so fast. It's very mysterious. I've been fighting fires all my life, and it's a mystery to me." Park City Fire Marshall Herb Johnson John-son suggested that coal dust could have acted as a catalyst in the blaze, helping spread the flames to the old, dry timbers. And he argued that the fire could have burned for some time inside the building before breaking through near the roof line. "When the fire started on the first floor, the building acted like a chimney, chim-ney, creating its own convection," he said. "When I saw it, there were flames 200 feet above the building." Johnson asked people who have pictures pic-tures taken during the early portion of the fire to contact either himself or the Park City Police Department. Firefighters managed to prevent the fire from spreading to nearby homes. But a small foreign car, parked just outside the chain-link fence which guarded the Coalition Building, was gutted. And the intense heat melted windows in two railroad cars parked about 150 feet east of the burning building. Embers touched off several small brush fires on the hillside to the east, 'but each was" quickly extinguished . ;( "A crowd of local residents gathered at the scene of the fire, awakened either by the sirens or by the bright light which illuminated much of the old section of town. Pillinger reported that many of the bystanders were in tears. "It was the most emotional fire I've ever seen," she said. The first firemen to pour water on the fire itself were members of the Heber City Fire Department, who arrived about 5:30 a.m. By that time, the flames had begun to subside, reducing the threat to nearby buildings. By 6 a.m., all that remained was the charred framework of massive, 16-inch 16-inch beams which supported the bottom bot-tom two stories of the building. By 6:30, firefighters from the outlying communities were rolling up their hoses and going home. The blackened skeleton continued to smoke for much of the day, with occasional oc-casional bursts of orange flame licking at the corners of the beams. Afraid that the structure might collapse, the Fire Department called in a crane from the construction site of the nearby near-by Park Station Hotel to do the job properly. The crane, swinging a large chunk of concrete, finally persuaded the second story to collapse about 1:30 p.m. The residents at 807 Park Avenue, almost directly across the street from the fire, could be seen on their front porch Monday, armed with paint and brushes, covering up some of the damage done by the heat. "You couldn't stand around here (during the fire)," Ingrid Mager recalled. "I don't know how the Fire Department did it. "Later on we realized there was lighter fluid and gasoline right on the ' porch;'. ?: : ';: ': ' 'vr- Mager ' said that Jack Sweeney, owner of the Coalition Building, had visited each house in the area that day to make sure that everyone was o.k. Painted in large letters on the front of the Mager house were two words which spoke for the whole neighborhood: neigh-borhood: "We survived." . Jk1 ' -.:'":V'- , .. -ik . mnji ftfirt - - - , |