Predawn fire destroys longtime Berkeley media center

Berkeley -
An early-morning fire destroyed the East Bay Media Center, a decades-old Berkeley institution.

 The fire broke out at about 3:15 a.m. near Milvia and Addison streets downtown, just blocks from UC Berkeley, and forced the evacuation of nearby apartment buildings filled with students.

"I see the window is very orange, and I'm like, 'This isn't usually how it looks at this time of day,'" said Subhash Prasad, who was among those evacuated. "I thought it was, like, a campfire."

Difficulty accessing fire

What we know:

Battalion Chief Brian Harryman of the Berkeley Fire Department said firefighters had a number of challenges on-scene.

"There was a heavy fire load inside the building. It was a media center, so lots of tapes, lots of computer systems," Harryman said. "It was very difficult to get to, and about halfway through the fire we had the roof collapse, which made it even more difficult to get to the back half of the building."

The all-clear came at about 7:30 a.m.

There were no reported injuries, but smoke and flames damaged the sides of surrounding buildings.

Media center's origins

The backstory:

 The media center specializes in film transfer and duplication, equipment rentals, teen media training and consultations.

 "I'm in shock at this point because the media center was founded by the community," said co-founder Paul Blake, who helped start the media center in the '80s in part to document the Democratic National Convention.

"It was devastating," Blake said. "We've lost so much. We lost archival material, as well as technical and electronic material."

The city recognized the media center for restoring this building, and now the structure is red-tagged.

"This is a really hard loss," said Berkeley City Councilmember Igor Tregub, who represents downtown and stands ready to support the media center.

"As a native of Ukraine, the importance of free and fair media reporting live coverage in an honest way is more important to me now than ever before," Tregub said.

Maureen O'Shea stopped to take a look at the aftermath. She says she's visited the center a number of times while visiting her son, including to get film transferred onto CDs.

"It's when you look at a kid and see the tooth lost," O'Shea said. "It's something that was important here, people congregated to. It's what gives this place some flavor, gives Berkeley some flavor."

Henry Lee is a KTVU reporter. E-mail Henry at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter @henrykleeKTVU and www.facebook.com/henrykleefan