Chicago ? Jerry Lawrence could smell the smoke as he headed for the stairs on the 32nd floor but he figured it was just a trash fire. It wasn’t until he and others had crowded into the stairwell and the smoke began thickening around them that he began to worry.

“You could feel people picking up their pace in the stairwell as it became clearer and clearer that the fire was pretty bad,” he said.

The fire began around 5 p.m. Friday as many workers in the 35-story Cook County administration building were preparing to go home for the weekend.

Only after the blaze had been put out did firefighters find about a dozen more people in the stairwell and on the 22nd floor. Six of them were dead.

Saturday, eight survivors remained hospitalized

Officials hadn’t determined Saturday what started the fire but said it had gutted a storage room in the Secretary of State’s Office and damaged much of the 12th floor. Fire Commissioner James Joyce said the building had an alarm system but no sprinklers above the first floor. It holds as many as 2,500 people during business hours.

One question investigators were asking was whether workers should have been told to evacuate.

Employees said they obeyed an announcement to leave the building using two stairwells, but Joyce said Saturday that fire officials didn’t issue the order and did not know who did.

“Since Sept. 11 everyone’s mind is set on when there’s a fire in a high rise, you have to evacuate, but many times people are safer staying where they are,” fire department spokeswoman Molly Sullivan said.