News Agency Hit By Fire

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32301, 20 May 1970, Page 17

News Agency Hit By Fire

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

LONDON, May 19.

Reuters, the international news service, temporarily interrupted by a fire which swept through the upper floors of its headquarters in London last night, took swift emergency measures to restore the flow of news to the world.

Links were organised between key points such as New York, Bonn and Singapore, and a selection of top news items was distributed from these centres until a normal service from Fleet Street was restored. The blaze severly damaged the seventh floor administration offices. The top storey restaurant area escaped comparatively lightly. No-one was hurt But at one time the situation looked so ugly that the 400 persons working in the building were moved out. A force of about 100 firemen and 30 fire engines blocked Fleet Street, hub of Britain’s newspaper industry. Water from a burst hose flooded the adjacent St Bride’s Church—the journalists’ church in Fleet Street. Staff of Reuters, the Australian Associated Press, and the Press Association, the British domestic news agency, stumbled down smoke-filled staircases as the fire raged overhead. When they returned they found themselves splashing through water from fire hoses and dripping from the ceilings, with no light and telephones and communications silenced.

On Reuter’s fourth editorial; floor, emergency lighting was quickly rigged up. Subeditors and technicians struggled to restore the news services throughout the world.

Early today salvage men were still pumping out water from the damaged floors—but the news was going out as usual through the Reuter’s communications network. It was the first time the building housing the 119-year-old news agency had been cleared of people since World War 11, when a German land-mine landed nearby without exploding.