‘There’s no saving it’: Building destroyed in fire must come down

A large apartment complex under construction in south Las Vegas devastated by a huge fire will have to be demolished on Thursday and the massive amount of debris removed, a Clark County fire official said.

“They have to tear this down,” Assistant Fire Chief Brian O’Neal said, standing across the street from the smoldering wreckage that was once several partially completed buildings. “There’s no saving it.”

The Tuesday blaze at 8030 W. Maule Ave., near South Buffalo Drive and the 215 Beltway in the southwest valley, engulfed and destroyed the uncompleted building complex, with the flames visible for miles.

Fire crews began responding after calls started coming in about 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Kelly Blackmon of the Clark County Fire Department said in a statement.

O’Neal said that the project destroyed in the conflagration was estimated to have cost $200 million, but firefighters were able to save a planned clubhouse valued at about $10 million.

“I can only remember one or two times in the last 20 years there’s been a fire of this magnitude,” O’Neal said.

“This is very rare to have a fire this size,” he said. “There is no way to put out a fire like that.”

The cause of the fire remains under investigation, he said.

One firefighter was transported to a hospital Tuesday for treatment for smoke inhalation and released, he said.

Martin-Harris Construction, the Las Vegas-based general contractor for the apartment building project, known as Kaktus Life III, issued a statement about the blaze.

“The associates of Martin-Harris Construction are disheartened by the fire on June 20, 2023, at our Kaktus Life III project site,” Guy Martin, company president, stated in an email.

“We feel blessed that all of our associates and subcontractor tradespersons are accounted for with no injuries,” Martin said. “We want to thank the Clark County Fire Department for their professionalism and will continue to work side by side with them while this event is under investigation.”

On Wednesday morning, some fallen debris from the building was in a heap of twisted metal, and another section showed one side of a building standing, both areas still emitting wide streams of white smoke.

Several bare concrete towers that were once elevator shafts were still standing, as if left over from a bombing raid.

O’Neal said he watched the blaze about 11 p.m. Tuesday, and it was”one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen — a massive building is just completely engulfed in fire.”

“It’s a five-story building with flames a hundred feet in the air.”

To tear down the devastated complex, firefighters will have to bring in an excavator-like device to pull it to the ground, the assistant chief said.

The equipment was needed because it can be set up to reach the buildings but well away from the concrete cover of the project’s underground parking garage, which might be full of water and pose a danger, O’Neal said, adding that there are only one or two of these devices available in the Las Vegas Valley.

The building to the north collapsed in the blaze last night, and the flames made their way into the interiors of the neighboring buildings, making it hard for firefighters attempting to douse it with water hoses, he said.

“You can’t put out a building burning on the inside from the outside,” he said. “Over time we were going to lose it, there was just nothing we could do about that.”

At one point, a crew trying to put out the fire on the roof of one of the buildings, where it was first reported, went to switch from a water tank for their hoses to a hydrant outside the project on Maule Avenue, but the heat was so intense they had to withdraw, he said.

Fire crews were able to prevent the flames from reaching the clubhouse, a significant asset for the project’s owners, O’Neal said.

“It’s pretty amazing on something on this scale to have one structure come out unscathed,” he said.

Sheldon Tabas, 72, a resident of a neighboring apartment complex and member of its homeowners association, said he and other tenants viewed the fire and wondered if they would be ordered to evacuate as the people at the Maverick apartment buildings on Maule Avenue did.

As it happened, the wind was blowing away from their complex, carrying smoke and cinders with it, he said.

“It was a concern but luckily not a reality,” he said.

John Cekala, 70, a visitor from Albuquerque, New Mexico, said he saw the flames as he returned to his unit from the supermarket Tuesday and went to go look through the rear fence. Within seconds, the entire roof was engulfed.

“It was quick,” he said. “It was about 40 minutes for the first building to start collapsing. You could hear the whole noise of it collapsing.”

Spot fires

O’Neal said Wednesday night that fire crews also responded to smaller fires Tuesday that were caused by the radiant heat and flying embers from the massive blaze.

In the 7900 block of West Sunset Road, firefighters found several palm trees, bushes, a dumpster and rubber waterproofing material on a roof on fire. The fires were extinguished with no extension into the building.

Also, several trees and bushes caught fire at an apartment complex at 7960 Rafael Rivera Way. Crews found multiple dumpsters, shrubs and material on the clubhouse roof that had caught fire. The fire spread to the clubhouse attic before being extinguished.

A resident of the complex told the Review-Journal Tuesday that when firefighters started spraying their hoses on the Maule Avenue blaze, fiery embers and debris began raining down on her complex, igniting fires in the grass and dumpsters.

For about three hours, firefighters put out spot fires and patrolled the area north of the freeway in case additional fires ignited.

A previous version of this story misspelled the last name of Assistant Fire Chief Brian O’Neal.

Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0382. Follow him @JeffBurbank2 on Twitter. Staff writer David Wilson contributed to this report.