Fire at Mad Myrna's bar quickly extinguished

No injuries were reported in a fire Wednesday morning at a downtown Anchorage bar that was quickly brought under control.

The fire, on the second floor of Mad Myrna's on the 500 block of East Fifth Avenue, was reported just after 9 a.m. when a bystander saw smoke rising from a window, the Anchorage Fire Department said.

The first of more than a dozen responding AFD units arrived two minutes later, said Deputy Chief Erich Scheunemann.

The blaze, which never left the second floor, was brought under control just after 9:15 a.m. A single second-story window in the building was broken at the scene Wednesday morning.

"They managed to contain it there," Scheunemann said.

AFD Senior Capt. Paul Urbano said at the scene that fire crews quickly responded from Fire Station 1 downtown, just a few blocks west. Firefighters were also aided by preplanned deployment routes for a fire at Mad Myrna's, which AFD has also considered for other downtown buildings.

"We pulled into the alley, we saw smoke coming out of that window right there; no fire yet, so we knew the fire was probably contained," Urbano said. "We forced entry to that stairwell door, we got up, hit the second door on the right and the fire was in that room."

The fire was extinguished quickly enough that Urbano called it a "contents" fire, in which items within a building rather than the structure itself constitute the only damage.

Jeff Wood, the general manager at Mad Myrna's, said the fire appeared to be accidental. Nobody was at the bar when it started.

"We think it might have been a power strip in the office, but it was confined to the office and we're real lucky," Wood said. "We'll be down for a day or two, and we'll be up and running pretty quick."

There wasn't any immediate estimate on damages from the fire, Wood said.

Rugile Kaladyte contributed information to this story.