A huge blaze broke out on a lot at Universal Studios in Los Angeles this morning alerting over 300 firefighters who tried to stop the fire, which already destroyed a building and threatened the studio's film vault. Apparently, the fire started at around 4 a.m. Sunday morning on a sound stage on a back lot.

Several areas were affected by the fire, amongst which a New York City streetscape used in numerous movies and TV shows, the King Kong exhibit which included a 30-foot-tall moving King Kong model, the Back to the Future set with its town square and clock tower, one full soundstage and a video vault with about 40,000 videos. However, film negatives and other priceless materials were stored safely in underground buildings several hundred yards from the fire, according to studio head Ron Meyer.

Though the cause for the fire hasn't yet been identified, but several press reports claim it is possible that filming might have been going on at the time and at least one explosion occurred. The fire spread so violently because the sets are made almost entirely of wood.

This is not the first blaze that the studio experienced, as a major fire broke out in November 1990, completely destroying the sets for a large number of television and movie productions and causing $25 million in damage. The man responsible for the incident, one of the security guards, was sentenced to four years in jail.

After that incident, a new sprinkler system with larger pipes was apparently installed. County fire chief Michael Freeman said to AFP that those so-called "deluge pipes" might in fact have been partly to blame for the lack of water pressure on Sunday. It appears that the system was poorly designed and could not sustain sprinkling over large areas at the same time.