Hotel guests evacuated for Downtown Dallas parking garage fire

DALLAS - Guests are back in their hotel rooms after a fire in a neighboring parking garage forced them to evacuate early Wednesday morning.

Firefighters battled the three-alarm blaze inside the Hampton Inn and Suites parking garage on Ervay and Commerce streets around 3 a.m. That’s located across from the Neiman Marcus in Downtown Dallas.

No one was hurt but the hotel’s guests did get an early wakeup call. They had to wait outside for about three hours while firefighters worked to put out the fire.

A man who lives in an apartment complex nearby described the chaos. He said he glanced outside and saw smoke everywhere. He said the flames at one point were about 30 feet high.

“We’re looking at people in the Hampton moving around in their rooms and we’re seeing that from my place. And we get the light out and I’m trying to get them like, ‘Hey, your building is on fire. You might want to run out or something.’ So once we got some video we ran down here and tried to scope it out. And obviously, it looked like everyone got out of here,” Dan Bentliff said.

More than 100 firefighters responded to the three-alarm effort. Ervay and Commerce streets were also closed because of the fire.

Officials said the parking garage was still under construction and had a 200-foot crane located in the middle of it. They’re now concerned that the crane was compromised. They’re trying to come up with a safe plan to move it and clean up the mess.

The hotel itself was not damaged.

The cause of the fire is still unknown.