GloucesterTimes.com, Gloucester, MA

If the Lorraine Apartments building were constructed today, instead of 1910, it would have had a sprinkler system that could have knocked down the fire that erupted in death and destruction late Friday night and early Saturday.

State Fire Marshal Steven Coan, Gloucester fire Chief Barry McKay and state police investigators combed the rubble on the Middle Street site and conducted interviews yesterday, trying to nail down the cause of the conflagration that took down the four-story apartment building, killed its resident handyman, and spilled flames onto the adjacent synagogue, destroying that as well.

Arson has never been suspected.

McKay said the destructive force of the fire was so great he believes "no physical evidence will be found." Instead, he said, the search for the cause "will be drawn from witness interviews and pictures of the scene."

McKay's account of the search for the cause of smoke that set off the fire alarms late Friday night, spurring the 911 call, centered in the basement of the 98-year-old building, wood-frame construction inside a stucco shell.

There, just a few minutes after the call, a team of firefighters, searching in one of the four basement apartments, reported by radio "we think we've got it" only to learn moments later that they hadn't - they reported finding sparks falling down a utility conduit in the wall from the upper floors.

It was a sign the fire was already above them in the walls and ceiling.

From that point, fire raced through the framing of the building, exploding through the flat roof with such heat and force that cinders were carried down to the waterfront. The Roman candle effect was visible all across the outer harbor, right out to Eastern Point.

The raging fire took the life of Robert Taylor, 70, who lived in the building and cared for it for the building's owners, Gary Raso and Daniel Gattineri. Recovery teams continued to search for his body yesterday. He was last seen collapsed in a third-floor room by a firefigher who was driven back by the smoke and flames.

McKay and firefighters long had suspected a fire in the Lorraine would become unstoppable.

McKay said the "balloon construction" of the building, typical of the times in which it was built, created the ideal conditions for a fast-moving fire.

"Balloon construction" describes an inexpensive building method devised in the 19th century in which long studs run from the foundation to the eaves line, without fire breaks. That gives flames a straight shot from cellar to attic and across the ceilings.

In general, that seemed to be how the Lorraine went up in flames so quickly that firefighters were pulled from the building for their own safety. They said the aggressive nature of the blaze thwarted efforts to save Taylor, the one resident who hadn't gone out into the street when firefighters realized minutes after they arrived - just three minutes after the 911 call - that the building was malignant with flames in the wall and ceilings.

McKay said sprinklers almost certainly would have been able to knock down a basement fire in a piece of furniture - if that was the way the fire started in a basement apartment. But, he said, sprinklers "don't guarantee" anything, and he noted that if the fire started in the walls and not on the basement floor, then sprinklers would not have been effective.

Gary Raso and his real-estate partner Daniel Gattineri acquired the Lorraine in 1999 for $750,000, and invested $10,000 in new windows and made other improvements, building inspector William Sanborn said.

But Raso said yesterday he "never gave it a thought" to installing sprinklers and said he "had no idea (the Lorraine) was a dangerous building." Sprinklers are not legally required in such non-conforming buildings and, according to experts, are rarely, if ever, retrofitted in.

Sprinklers are required in new apartment buildings the size of the Lorraine and are required to be added in somewhat larger old apartment buildings. But the four-story, 24-apartment Lorraine was too small to be covered by the code requirements.

Sprinkler costs - about $80,000 for a building the size of the Lorraine - are prohibitive with no real hope of a return on the investment. Richard Demichele, a designer of sprinkler systems with Metro-Swift, told the Times that "most people would be willing to pay more for fine carpets than they would for safer buildings."

The Lorraine was not a fancy building. It was comprised of one- and two-bedroom units, basic inexpensive apartments. But it was in a prime location on the city's historic Middle Street, flanked by old homes, law offices, a library and a row of houses of worship a stone's throw from City Hall.

Since Raso and Gattineri bought the Lorraine, its assessed value has climbed, according to city assessor Tim Good, largely because of the very anomaly that made it so extremely non-conforming.

Good said the assessment increase to a value of $1.9 million at the time of the fire was due to zoning that bars new construction of anything like the concentration of 24 units in the Lorraine. Current rules would allow only three units on the 7,420-square-foot lot on which the apartment building stood.

"If you build today, at code, you're not going to be able to do that number of units," he said.

Good also said adding sprinklers would not have had much effect on the property's value because he said it was difficult to equate increased value with sprinklers.

Sprinklers are not a significant factor in real market value," he said.

Raso and Gattineri own a number of properties in Gloucester including the mixed-use Gattineri Building at the far West End, which they built earlier at the start of the decade to fill an empty spot in the shopping district.