Fire in Chicago

(Photo by Jim Frost, Chicago Sun-Times)

Fire at the LaSalle Bank building, 135 S. LaSalle St. No fatalities, fortunately (or at least so far). My guess is that the city's 12-year phase-in plan for requiring buildings to be retrofitted for sprinklers will soon be accelerated to, oh, 12 months.

The local news coverage was, as usual, comically inept. The local news anchors proved, once again, to be little more than well-coifed, orthodontically-perfect script readers, and not journalists. (NBC-5 weatherman Brant Miller was an on-camera mainstay, his meteorology degree apparently not making him any less of a journalist than the others.) Coverage consisted largely of the anchors watching the same live feed as the rest of us, and spending most of the time speculating and ooh-ahhing. No fire safety or architectural experts were brought in, and very few on-street interviews were done with people who escaped the building.

At one point, NBC-5 cut frantically to a "news conference" with a LaSalle spokesman, who revealed in just a few sentences that he had absolutely nothing to say, other than yes, indeed, this is the headquarters of LaSalle Bank. And although his words were soon drowned out by the whump-whump-whump of a fire department helicopter circling overhead, the newscast stayed with him for several inexorable minutes. Which lead, after they cut back to the studio, to the rather amusing scene of the anchors speculating on what they thought they heard him say.

And, sadly, all those hours of coverage failed to include one of those classic, hastily-arranged news conferences at City Hall, starring a flustered, sleep-deprived and testy-to-the-point-of-hostility Mayor Daley, seething over reporters' impertinent questions and blurting out responses in his incomparable Bridgeport-ese.