University, state and federal officials are investigating the cause of a Thursday fire on the fourth floor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Medical Sciences building.
The Madison Fire Department reported no injuries after responding to a three-alarm fire at 1300 University Ave. around 8 a.m.
The fire began in one of the building’s labs, but no bio-hazardous or flammable material was in the area.
Investigators sealed off the portion of the building where the fire started, said MFD spokesperson Lori Wirth. State and federal investigators are working with the UW Police Department and MFD to determine the cause of the fire.
Wirth said the university will have to calculate potential damages, including research and specialized equipment as well as infrastructural damages.
According to a UWPD press release, water, smoke and soot damaged parts of the building outside of the small portion of the building’s fourth floor where the fire was.
The number of other buildings surrounding the Medical Sciences building as well as its massive size made finding the source of the fire difficult for the firefighters, according to Wirth.
“The fire alarm system is older and it doesn’t really function the way the newer ones would,” Wirth said. “We had to send multiple crews in and try to [find the fire] by the process of elimination.”
Additionally, Wirth said part of the building’s aged infrastructure failed. Rather than sprinklers helping the MFD to extinguish the fire, as the MFD originally thought, some of the building’s water lines broke and sprayed into the room where the fire was.
“They just looked like sprinklers to the firefighters because there was water coming from the ceiling,” Wirth said.
One animal was evacuated from the building in a cage covered to protect it from the cold, according to Wirth.
Only gross anatomy and undergraduate physiology class sections will be affected by building closures which resulted from the fire, according to University Communications spokesperson John Lucas. The remainder of the building is open for UW-Madison students.
