Early last week on June 1st 4:43 am, a Universal Studios security guard spotted what turn out to be a major fire in the back lot of the studio where many big budget films took place, for example Back to the Future, Transformers and Spider-Man 2. The 12 hour blaze destroy a part of the back lot including the New York City streetscape, the King Kong feature and the courthouse square from Back to the Future but the famous clock tower survived the fire and is still standing much relief to many film fans.

After an investigation to the cause of the fire, LA County Fire Chief Michael Freeman told reporters that the cause of the fire was due to the use of a blowtorch. Workers at the time had been using a blowtorch on a roof of one of the sets in the streetscape area to heat asphalt shingles. According to the fire Chief workers finished at 3 am, they followed policy and stood watch for 1 hour and then left. Obviously, 1 hour wasn't long enough. During the course of the fire fireman had to fight exploding propane tanks as well as a reported water pressure issues but Chief Freeman said that all water systems were up to the code however fireman still tapped into other sources including the lakes and ponds at Universal.

The biggest scare was that the fire threatened the video archives which housed, according to AOL News, 40 to 50 thousand videos. Thankfully the Universal President Ron Meyer said that there are duplicates of everything.

Just like the fire back in 1990, which happened to be in the same place, Universal Studio's will rebuild as quickly as possible. Thankfully emergency personal only suffered minor injuries and the fire was contained to the back lot for the duration.

I've held off posting about this for the week for a couple of different reasons a lot of which had to do with me not having enough time but after holding off for a couple of days, I'd figured I'd wait for this weekend to post about it so I could give you what ever I could find.  Besides a couple of links leading to sets of photos you'll be able to see several videos, from news outlets to just candid videos taken by the good people of California.  Click read more to see the full post below.

Source: AOL / Yahoo!

-Phil

Those you who stuck around to see the videos can also take a look at 3 different sets of photos from various news outlets.  You can see each set HERE, HERE and HERE!

Now below you can see several different videos from the fire.