BU Tallies Blaze Losses: No Cause Announced Yet

Boston University (BU) official yesterday continued to lift through charred remnants of Sunday night's fire which ravaged four floors of a Bay State Rd. building.

No cause has yet been attributed to the blaze, which destroyed over half a million dollars worth of property, mostly from the mathematics and economics departments, the School for Social Work, and the Center for Asian Studies. Eleven offices and several seminar rooms were burned, and a spokesman estimated that the building would be closed at least another week.

"We don't yet know the volume or the value of what was destroyed," he said, adding that much of the damage encompassed ruined paperwork.

The economics department was hit the hardest by Sunday's blaze, according to Department Chairman William Kapron. Three offices belonging to professors and teaching fellows were "completely wiped out," Kapron said, destroying irreplaceable papers and research notes. The department also lost most of its instructional materials for introductory economics courses Nevertheless, Kapron termed the overall damage "surprisingly moderate."

The School for Social Work also lost several publications in progress. Director Hubert Jones said. He added that four of the school's offices will not reopen until next fall.

Other departments fared better. Andrea White, administrative assistant of the mathematics department, said that no extensive research was lost in the blaze, although it consumed much of the department's computer equipment Computer and word processing equipment in the Center for Asian Studies also suffered extensive fire and water damage, said another spokesman.

Brookline and Boston firefighters spend four hours battling the blaze, which began about 11:10 p.m. said John Doyle, BU chief of security Doyle said security officers will continue to patrol the building until department workers return next week.

Jack Morse, captain of the Harvard University Police Department, said that Harvard has not experienced a fire of serious magnitude since 1965, when a blaze erupted in a Quincy House suite. A portion of the lower in Memorial hall also caught fire in the 1950s, he said.

Sunday's fire at BU brought back bitter memories for the University of Michigan, whose economics building burned to the ground last Christmas Eve. The school recently received an insurance settlement of $1.4 million, but has yet to permanently relocate its economics department.