Downtown Lawrence was destroyed by fire — with the help of Quantrill’s Raiders — in 1863. Now some senior firefighters say the heart of the city again is vulnerable to a major conflagration.

“It’s just a nightmare waiting to happen,” said Jerry Karr, a division commander with Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical.

“That’s one of my worst fears,” said Stan Ray, a captain in the department.

“We could lose people real easily down there,” said Mark Elliott, another departmental captain.

The reasons: the post-Civil War masonry-and-wood construction of many Massachusetts Street buildings is brittle, not designed to last so long or accommodate 21st century necessities such as the air conditioning units that adorn many building rooftops. Many buildings are attached to each other, making it easier for fires to spread.

“The fire load is so high” Karr said. “They were temporary construction, supposed to last 30, 40 years. They’re still around 140 years later. Age has taken its toll.”

Prevention efforts

Downtown has seen a series of mostly small fires in recent years. Still, firefighters said, flames in one downtown building could easily claim a whole block.

Firefighters try to stay ahead of the game by conducting regular safety inspections in downtown buildings. And City Hall is planning a three-year expansion of downtown water lines that will, among other benefits, expand firefighting capacity.

Lawrence-Douglas County Fire & Medical personnel work to extinguish a fire that started in a wood pile behind Wheatfields Bakery, 904 Vt. The blaze occurred April 5, 2000. Area emergency crews are worried that downtown buildings are vulnerable to a major fire because of their post-Civil War masonry-and-wood construction.

But few buildings have their own sprinkler systems, and city officials say they don’t want to impose the financial burden on locally owned businesses that may already operate on thin margins.

“It’s just sort of out of our reach until we make it economically feasible,” Mayor Mike Rundle said.

Downtown store owners, though, acknowledge the concern.

“It would be devastating,” said Maria Martin, director of Downtown Lawrence Inc. and owner of Southwest and More, 727 Mass.

The Sunflower fire

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The most devastating downtown fire of the past decade was a February 1997 blaze at Sunflower Outdoor and Bike Shop, 802-804 Mass.

Dan Hughes owns the store now, but was an employee at the time. He received a call from the alarm company that something was wrong, hopped on his bike and headed to the store — thinking, until he arrived, that he’d find a minor problem.

“It was pretty obvious it was a major fire,” Hughes recalled. “I spent the rest of the evening across the street, at the Casbah, just watching the whole thing go up.”

The blaze caused more than $1 million in damage; Hughes recalled employees finding a melted red plastic lump in the middle of the floor — all that remained of a kayak on sale at the store.

Firefighters kept the fire from expanding to the entire block by calling in assistance from Overland Park and Lenexa fire departments and pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water into neighboring buildings to halt the spread of flames.

“That,” Karr recalled last week, “was a hell of a stop.”

The cause of the fire was never determined, though fire officials think combustible material stored near a water heater in the basement may have been to blame. Shortly after the blaze Lawrence Fire Marshal Rich Barr ruled out electrical causes or arson.

When the store reopened at the location a year later, a new sprinkler system had been installed at a cost in the “tens of thousands of dollars,” Hughes said. There had been no sprinklers previously.

Elliott said the city was fortunate that the Sunflower fire — and other downtown fires of recent years — hadn’t been more damaging.

“We’ve trained for some of it — I believe our level of training helps some — but I believe some of it is luck,” Elliott said.

After the Sunflower fire, the Lawrence City Commission considered requiring downtown basements to be equipped with automatic fire sprinklers. But Downtown Lawrence members opposed the proposal, saying they’d get hit with bills of at least $16,500 to get the jobs done.

“That’s more than their income a lot of the time,” Downtown Lawrence representative Myles Schachter told officials at a 1998 meeting.

Sprinklers and money

Barr, the fire marshal, said last week that fewer than 20 percent of downtown buildings had sprinklers. The city requires the systems only in large downtown basements — and then only if the building is occupied by a drinking establishment or if remodeling is being done to change the building’s use.

Firefighters want the sprinklers required downtown, but officials are reluctant.

“It’s an easy thing to agree should be done,” Rundle said, but added: “I wouldn’t support any kind of regulation at this point unless there were some concurrent program to help finance it.”

In the meantime, fire officials will continue their annual inspections of all downtown buildings to reduce the chance of a fire.

Firefighters work to put out the blaze at Sunflower Outdoor and Bike Shop, 802-804 Mass. The February 1997 fire caused more than million in damage.

“If you have some things (fire code violations) on the checklist, they come back within that month period to make sure you are complying,” Martin said. “I think that’s really wonderful.”

Hughes agreed.

“If we can’t afford to pay for a sprinkler system, it’s pretty important we be buttoned up,” he said.

Rundle also agreed. The entire city, he said, has a vested interest in keeping downtown standing.

“It’s more than identity,” Rundle said. “It’s an economic engine — we try to boost the sales tax, promote tourism and promote our historic resources. And in all of that (downtown) is a foundation, a centerpiece.”