Those old wooden structures are death traps.
They are so dry it’s a wonder more people don’t die in them in blazes like this.
They are just disasters waiting to happen.
What happened to any degree of fire code enforcement? How is such a building given a certificate of occupancy?
The before fire pictures showed a number of cluttered rooms. The news reports said that the only stairs to the second floor was a makeshift arrangement of wood pallets that caught fire making any exit impossible.
It was actually a block building with a wooden floor and roof. The structural members were steel. Go look at the pictures, they had broken down pallets and decorated everything with the wood. The place was a maze of rabbit warren walkthroughs. The wood and other object could not be arraigned better to support combustion. I can only imagine how quickly the place was engulfed in an inferno. A boy scout could not have constructed a better fire, all that super dry fuel with much exposure to oxygen. The place was a deathtrap.