Q: Video of the World Trade Center fires brought to mind a high-rise fire in Atlanta in the 1980s. I recall news video of a man in a window above the street with smoke billowing from behind him. Can you provide some details of that fire?
—Barbara Mitchell, Villa Rica
A: Smoke and fumes quickly consumed the halls of the sixth floor of the Peachtree 25th Building about 10:25 a.m. on June 30, 1989.
People in the offices had only seconds to react.
Flames and dense black clouds clogged the corridors, but several workers made their way to outside windows, where some provided fresh air by shattering the glass with office equipment.
“It was madness for a couple of minutes,” one survivor later told the AJC. “We were hanging out the window trying to breathe. No one was talking coherently. I didn’t know where the fire was, but I knew it was gaining on us.”
Firemen and the media quickly arrived, and video and photos from the fire show people huddled around the broken windows, waiting to be rescued by ladder trucks.
Hundreds made it out safely, but five people were killed and about 30 others injured — including at least five firefighters — in the 10-story building at 1718–1720 Peachtree Street.
Peachtree 25th is still there, at the intersection of 25th Street.
Another survivor, a Vietnam War vet, told the AJC later that summer: “In Vietnam, you had a chance to fight back; there was no chance in the fire.”
Four people died on the sixth floor and one died in the hospital three days later. Another woman jumped and survived her 60-foot fall with broken bones and internal injuries.
“The city of Atlanta better thank God above for their fire department,” former Atlanta judge Arthur Kaplan, a paramedic who helped train first responders, told the AJC at the time. “They got in, they got the people out. It’s the most commendable job I’ve ever seen in the United States. This could have been a complete disaster.”
The fire started after what the AJC described as “a series of electrical explosions, which occurred as a maintenance worker attempted to change a fuse after a power failure.”
The building, which was built in the 1960s, wasn’t equipped with a sprinkler system.
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