Hot Ashes Nearly Burn Down Olympia’s Pride

Carelessness on the part of employees of the Capitol Steam Laundry, which occupies a portion of the basement of the Olympia Hotel, caused a fire this morning, the timely discovery of which saved the hotel from destruction. It was at five minutes before 2 o'clock, when preparations were being made to scrub out the main corridor, that the smoke was first discovered by Walter Kegley. Under the stairway alongside the elevator is a spacious closet, in which are kept the brooms and buckets, and when this door was opened, a cloud of smoke and the odor of burning rubbish was working up through the cracks of the floor. Efforts to discover the whereabouts of the fire were for a time fruitless, but the fact that it was in close contact with the elevator shaft made it more dangerous, and had it made any headway at all, it would have certainly resulted in the destruction of the building. A. R. Empy, the clerk of the hotel, and the night engineer, assisted by Mr. Ballou, of Van Epps' book store, instituted a thorough search through the basement of the building. In the laundry, facing on the alley at the south side of the building, the flames were discovered. Somebody had emptied hot ashes into a wooden box and the fire had evidently smouldered for six or eight hours before breaking into flames. The fact that the basement floor of the laundry was of cement instead of wood was the only thing in the world that saved the building. As it was, had not the timely discovery been made, the flames would have quickly communicated with the bundles of clothing and other material in the room. An entrance was quickly effected and buckets of water soon extinguished the blaze.