Post office pitches tent, salvages mail

The postal workers union questions the lack of a sprinkler system and evacuation during a fire.

[Times photo: Ken Helle] Mary Horton gets her mail handed to her by postal employee Paul Lavender in a temporary tent on the grounds of the Ybor City Post Office.

By WAYNE WASHINGTON

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 23, 2000

TAMPA -- Just outside the shade of a tent set up on an Ybor City parking lot, residents lined up to get their mail Monday.

If not for last week's fire, they would have been reaching into post office boxes in the cool of an air-conditioned building instead of standing under a hot sun. But the minor inconvenience, residents said, pales when compared with the horror of what could have been.

A huge fire raged for 20 minutes just across the street from the post office Friday before workers realized what was going on. Heat from that blaze burned through the roof of the post office, torching the wooden structure underneath.

Panicked postal workers scrambled out of the building before it burned.

But that good fortune masks other, unanswered questions about Friday's fire: Why did the 21,000-square-foot building have no sprinkler system? Were workers evacuated soon enough?

Those questions, said Floyd Pawson, president of the local union of postal workers, need answers. "We intend to notify OSHA and Congressman Jim Davis," Pawson said. "This could have been a very serious tragedy."

Pawson said the union is concerned that workers had only one exit and were temporarily trapped against a wrought iron fence as the fire approached. Finally, Pawson said, union leaders don't understand why sprinklers were not required in the 13-year-old building.

No one from the U.S. Postal Service could answer that question Monday, but several postal officials said sprinklers would not have saved the building.

Tampa Fire Rescue Capt. Bill Wade agreed.

"Sprinklers are down where the people are," Wade said. "The roof caught fire."

While the apartments' developer vows to rebuild on the scene of the fire, it was uncertain Monday whether the Postal Service will.

The state Department of Transportation plans to use as much as 18 feet of the post office site's north edge when it widens Interstate 4 sometime in the next three years. Postal Service officials said they have not decided to rebuild on that smaller site or elsewhere in Ybor.

On Monday, postal workers pulled blackened packages from the mess, drying some and wiping soot off others.

If salvaged mail is deliverable, it will be delivered, said Bridget Robertson, a customer relations coordinator for the U.S. Postal Service. Other parcels and letters will be returned to senders, if their addresses are legible. It could take a week to get the mail out of the building. All mail slowed by the fire will come with a note.

A trailer will be set up on the parking lot as a temporary post office. Customers with questions about service can call a special line set up to answer them: (813) 889-3952.

- Staff writer Steve Huettel contributed to this report.

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