A fire of unknown origin scorched a laboratory on the second floor of the Nanaline H. Duke Building Monday morning, causing students and workers to evacuate, University officials confirmed.
No one was injured in the blaze, but both the building and Research Drive--where the facility is located--were closed off for much of the day.
The fire, which started at about 6:17 a.m., took between one and two hours to contain, but never expanded beyond the structure's second floor, said Leanora Minai, senior communications strategist for the Office of Communication Services.
"My understanding is that the fire was limited to the lab, or just that one floor," Minai said. "But there's some damage to neighboring rooms."
Additionally, the first floor suffered minimal water damage.
The building remained closed until normal operation was scheduled to resume Tuesday morning, Minai explained.
The biggest concern for fire crews was a handful of freezers that contained samples of low-level radioactive compounds.
Although the freezers were damaged by the fire, the materials they contained were not affected, and the environment was determined to be safe, said Wayne Thomann, director of the Occupational and Environmental Safety Office.
"We had people on site and we were doing continuous monitoring," he said.
"There was no evidence that anything in the lab had been impacted. The two freezers did contain some samples that had radioactive isotopes at very low frequencies, [but clean-up personnel] transferred those samples," Thomann added.
Thomann added, however, that OESO would continue to monitor the building.
The Durham Fire Department is continuing to investigate the cause of the fire, although officials have officially designated the incident as accidental in nature.
Although the fire-damaged laboratory will require renovations, the rest of the building should be back to general functioning capacity Tuesday, Thomann said.
In the last decade, the Nanaline H. Duke Building has been the site of repeated blazes. In 1996, an electrical fire began in the basement of the structure, and the third floor of the building caught fire in an unrelated incident in 1998.
More recently, a three-alarm fire blazed on the roof of the Research Dr. building in 2000 when construction equipment erupted in flames.
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