By Jeff Gammage, Joelle Farrell, Diane Mastrull and Larry King
Philadelphia Inquirer

Investigators spent yesterday pressing their search into the cause of the massive blaze that lit up the Conshohocken waterfront on Wednesday night. But they can’t yet say how the fire started.

As scores of people milled at the site of the blaze, some newly homeless, many in despair, Gov. Rendell asked for a federal disaster declaration, which would allow the Small Business Administration to make low-interest loans available to people who suffered damages.

Conshohocken Fire Chief Robert Phipps called the fire one of the worst in borough history, in which the leaping flames were punctuated by explosions of materials at the construction site where the fire started.

“It went up like a match,” Mayor Joe Collins said.

Although police said yesterday morning that there was no sign of arson, fire officials later said they had not ruled out anything yet.

Yesterday, a pale blue sky hung over Conshohocken, making the devil-red inferno of the previous night seem like a bad dream. Dark beds of burnt wood, the ruins of a part of the luxury apartment complex, offered silent proof of the conflagration.

Remarkably, given the fire’s size and intensity, no one was killed.

The flames tore through the Riverwalk at Millennium, built as part of a Schuylkill riverfront renaissance. The fire began in a building that was under construction and quickly spread to occupied areas of the $51.8 million project, destroying two apartment buildings and leaving an estimated 375 people homeless.

The complex, on an old industrial site, was part of a riverfront revitalization led in part by developer J. Brian O’Neill. He built and then sold the housing development and currently owns the construction site, the Stables at Millennium, where the fire began.

Conshohocken Borough officials said yesterday that O’Neill’s projects were never cited for code violations. They were unable to immediately produce a record of inspections performed over the years.

At the scene yesterday, O’Neill said that although he didn’t know exactly what the borough regulations required when Riverwalk was built, his construction department told him “that everything was according to code, to the absolute centimeter.”

State Department of Labor and Industry officials said yesterday that O’Neill’s company had sought and received – after two initial denials – a variance from the Pennsylvania Industrial Board in 2003 that allowed the use of a sprinkler system a grade below the state standard of the time.

The variance allowed Riverwalk to use residential-grade sprinklers in return for adding more firewalls.

State officials said such variances were not unusual.

On Wednesday, O’Neill arrived at the scene as firefighters fought what became an eight-alarm blaze, helping to find food and water for crews and hotel rooms for displaced residents.

The blaze was declared under control about 10:30 p.m. A little after 11 p.m., as fire companies rolled up hoses, O’Neill optimistically described the devastation as “a temporary setback.”

He rejected any suggestion that an abundance of wood framing played any role in the aggressive pace of the fire, and defended the buildings’ construction, insisting, “Everything was done right.”

Mayor Collins said borough officers and engineers regularly inspected the site and found no violations. Sandra Caterbone, the Borough Council president, offered a strong defense of O’Neill: “He is clean and follows our codes to a T,” she said. “Whatever we want him to do, he does.”

The fire started about 4:52 p.m., sending a plume of dense black smoke into the rush-hour sky, disrupting SEPTA train service and slowing traffic to a crawl on the Schuylkill Expressway.

Yesterday morning, the trains and traffic were back to normal – it was people’s lives that had been altered.

At the site, some residents milled in parking lots, talking quietly or just staring at the ruins. One woman knelt on the pavement, sobbing into the shins of a friend who comforted her. Others seemed dazed, having lost everything they owned.

“I never imagined something like this would happen,” said one woman, newly homeless.

Officials said 11 firefighters were slightly injured, most suffering from heat exhaustion. Firefighters came from as far away as Pottstown to fight the blaze.

Yesterday afternoon, hundreds of residents gathered at the Spring Mill Fire Company, boarding buses that took them to their homes in the two largely undamaged apartment buildings.

There they were to be let inside briefly to recover essential belongings such as medications. Residents were warned that their apartments would look “broken into,” as firefighters had smashed doors to search for people and pets.

The power was still out yesterday, but officials said they hoped those residents could move back in soon, possibly today.

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