(Radio Iowa) – A fire has caused catastrophic damage to the historic Kirk Apartments in downtown Mason City. The Kirk opened in 1903 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Firefighters were called to the building at 1:30 Monday afternoon for a fire in a first-floor apartment and brought it under control about an hour later, but smoke and flames erupted from the building once again at about five o’clock. Mason City Fire Chief Erik Bullinger says he and other investigators were inside the building when they noticed the fire was spreading through the structure. “It actually kind of flamed up as it got kind of a breath of fresh air, some fresh oxygen to it, and actually got between floors, so it was actually traveling throughout the building we assume, and it got to a point where it was actually getting into several other apartment units at the same time,” he says. “At that time, we had to back crews out and start attacking the fire from the exterior doing a defensive fire attack.” At about 9:30 Monday night, fire crews were setting up lights and treating the building as a potential collapse zone.

“It’s hard to determine if it’s going to stand on its own,” he says. “We’re keeping most of the crews out of the collapse zone as far as we can, and at this point, we’ll call it almost out, but we’re going to continue pouring water in there just to try to get all the hot spots out.” Bullinger says while the first started in a single apartment, it may be tough to quickly determine a cause since the first spread and caused so much damage.  “We were just getting into that apartment to check things out, and we went in with the fire marshal just to make a preliminary investigation, and we weren’t in there very long, just to get an idea of the origin of the fire, but we weren’t able to do any straightforward investigation of the material. We like to keep it all intact and come back in with our equipment and sift through the debris and usually get a determination, but of course now that’s burned up quite a bit.”

KLGO photo

Bullinger says with the condition of the building, he questions whether a cause of the fire will ever be determined. “Sometimes you can piece things together, but with that amount of collapse in there, it may be to a point where we can’t get back into the building at all, then it will be pretty tough, unless we have maybe some witnesses that were able to piece things together that saw what happened and we can put that puzzle together later, but even then, it can be pretty tough to determine.”

The Kirk was the city’s first luxury apartment building, originally supplying heat, light and water for the apartments with its own steam generating plant before being hooked into the city’s utility system. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982 and is part of the downtown historic district in Mason City.