The abandoned 116-year-old Centennial Mills warehouse caught fire on the afternoon of August 2. Firefighting teams responded with everything in their arsenals to suppress flames rising eight stories high. Soon thereafter, portions of the interior infrastructure collapsed, plummeting to the foundation. As night fell, the wooden floors and other flammable materials blazed skyward like hellfire in a Pieter Bruegel painting.
Given that the building had no electrical power, it’s probable the fire was started by homeless people—it was a known hangout and shooting gallery. As a result of the debacle, Portland’s irremediable homeless problem was placed into stark relief.
By the following morning, the fire was out, but the problems were just beginning. There were unconfirmed reports that fire inspectors found charred human remains; that an unknown number of homeless individuals may have perished in the blaze.
Left standing after the conflagration were four eight-story, 19th-century reinforced concrete and masonry walls which supported a multi-ton rusted-out water tank. It didn’t take a structural engineer to know that someday, the tank would fall, and that the entire gutted edifice was unstable.
Since there was no way to know exactly in which direction a potential collapse would fall, passenger and freight rail traffic out of nearby Union Station was suspended, including the well-traveled Portland to Seattle line. Amtrak immediately deployed a bus fleet to traverse the distance between the Pacific Northwest’s two largest cities.
The best case would’ve been if the four walls had fallen inward against each other, creating a monumental pile of rubble. But like Lincoln Logs built up with no stabilizing interior skeleton, any weakening and some or all of the walls could fall outward from the foundational footprint, raining destruction for hundreds of feet in any direction.
City officials notified the property owner that the building would soon have to be demolished. Despite the danger of collapse, Union Pacific announced plans to resume freight operations eight days after the fire, before the planned demolition.
From Oregon Public Broadcasting: “Union Pacific told the city of Portland that on Sunday, Aug. 9, it will resume freight operations next to the Centennial Mills warehouse that burned in a massive fire. City officials are calling the decision a significant risk to health and safety, warning that a collapse could injure people on a passing train and damage surrounding property.”
A compromise was reached, with Union Pacific agreeing the no hazardous materials would be transported out of Union Station until the demolition was completed. Hundreds gathered on the sunny August day that the first step was taken to bring it all down. Demolition experts ascended the burnt-out structure and wired explosives to the precarious water tank. Upon detonation, the tank teetered and fell into the charred detritus below.
Next came the walls. This was to be no controlled implosion. Instead, crane-operated pusher arms reaching as high as 90 feet, equipped with steel plates one-two inches thick and five-10 feet in length, applied the pressure needed to force the century+ old walls inward and downward into a manageable heap. Gigantic blackened silos—the building had been a major flour mill and grain producer—toppled and fell with massive concrete sections. High pressure hoses kept the dust from rising and covering nearby buildings and neighborhoods.
With dust settled, things returned to normal. Normal in Portland is an ongoing discussion about the homelessness problem in the city. Local conservative media pronounced the fire to be emblematic of poor leadership responsible for a promulgation, not solution, to the problem.
The affiliate media covered the story like it always does: a big fire, the presence of homeless people, but no discernable judgments about the culpability of the elected officials or policies that have failed. The Centennial Mills warehouse sat on a prime piece of property along the Willamette River. There’s talk now of making that parcel into a city park.