![]() ![]() The fire was a four-alarmer that brought 19 engine companies and four truck companies-130 firefighters-to the White House. Secret Service agents carried out Hoover’s chair and the presidential flag. ![]() Allan Hoover and the president’s personal secretaries Lawrence Richey and George Akerson took the president’s desk drawers and hurried them away. When President Hoover’s group reached the executive office they crawled through a window to the left of the president’s desk and began removing steel cabinets packed with files. The next year some of them received a toy fire engine from the president. ![]() The children were never aware of any trouble. First Lady Lou Hoover was told about the fire and calmly remained to supervise the party. “I’ll go too,” said President Hoover as he rose from the table and asked the men to follow him into the hallway the president’s son Allan Hoover joined them. I want you to get your secretaries away from the table.” Marine Band playing Christmas carols in the corridor, when Ike Hoover appeared and whispered urgently in President Hoover’s ear: “The executive office is on fire. President Herbert Hoover and First Lady Lou Hoover were hosting a Christmas party for children of the president’s aides and friends, while a detail from the U.S. One turned on the alarm to the office of Chief Usher Ike Hoover (no relation to the president) while the other called the Washington, D.C., fire department. He and Trice grabbed fire extinguishers and went to work, but to no avail. “The whole loft is burning up!” Wood cried. They found that an estimated 200,000 government pamphlets on almost every imaginable topic, stored in an attic at the top of the stairway since the days of President Theodore Roosevelt, was going up like brushwood. Trice and Wood ran up a winding stairway above the executive offices where the smell of smoke and heat was intense. At approximately 8:00 p.m., White House messenger Charlie Williamson smelled smoke coming from the West Wing executive offices so he alerted White House police officer Richard Trice and Secret Service agent Russell Wood. He suffered non-life-threatening injuries.On Christmas Eve 1929 the White House experienced its most powerful fire since the British torched the Executive Mansion 115 years earlier. Last month, a man in a motorized wheelchair set his jacket on fire outside the White House, prompting a security lockdown. The man, who wasn’t immediately identified, was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries after suffering burns to 85 percent of his body, sources said. The shirt had writing on it but the witnesses couldn’t make out what it said. Other witnesses said the man was wearing a sweatshirt - despite the 90-degree heat - and carrying a black bag. The man collapsed as he was covered with a plume of white foam, Alina Berzins said. Officers are seen racing over to the man, including one armed with a red fire extinguisher, and police cruisers pulling up with lights flashing. They’re closing all surrounding streets right now.” “According to my daughter…she just saw a person that was on fire running across the White House lawn,” the dad, Krisjan Berzins, tweeted. Video shot by Berzins and posted to Twitter by her father shows the man, clad in black pants, covered head to toe in flames as he takes a slow walk across the grass near 15th Street NW and Constitution Avenue NW. “He starts running, and then we saw him covered in flames.” “We saw this man,” Alina Berzins, 17, who was visiting the National Mall with her two cousins, told CNBC. Witnesses saw the man erupt into a bright orange fireball at the Ellipse, a tourist-filled park that sits north of the Washington Monument, around 12:20 p.m. ![]()
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