The Indiana fire marshal on Tuesday accepted the South Bend Fire Department’s request for help in determining what caused the historic Lafayette Building to catch fire Monday.
After stopping at Floor Three on Monday, South Bend fire investigators Tuesday accessed the five-story building’s top two floors. The first thing they wanted to do was rule out any victims.
Assistant Chief Derrick Erquhart said the top floor was too buried by the collapsed roof for firefighters to safely search, so the state fire marshal brought in a cadaver-trained dog. It searched and found nothing. They also planned to bring in a dog later Tuesday to sniff for accelerants someone might have used to start the fire.
“We’re not going to know the cause today," Erquhart said. "It might be several days, several weeks, or several months. But we wanted to get back here today, make sure we got all of our initial stuff done, take all of our pictures, and then we’ll go back and start going through all of the information that we collected. Pictures, video, security camera footage, working on that timeline, and then we’ll go from there.”
But Joe Molnar, the city’s assistant director of growth and opportunity, says the building was secured, empty, and hadn’t had any utility service for years, which would seem to rule out electrical or natural gas causes.
"We have our property team, they were out there Saturday walking around, checking on everything, so even just less than 48 hours, and it was on our routine checklist," Molnar said. "It only had two entrances and those are both heavily secured, bolted, the bottom floor was boarded so no one could get into the doors there, so we had done everything in our power to make sure the site was secure."
