‘Tamron Hall’ set evacuated, show scrapped after grease fire at ABC Studios
The sets of ABC’s “Tamron Hall” and “The View” were evacuated Wednesday morning after a grease fire broke out in the former program’s on-set kitchen.
A spokesperson for the New York City Fire Department said the cause of the fire was burned food, Entertainment Weekly reported. Units arrived at the scene around 8:40 a.m. local time, and no injuries were reported.
Due to the evacuation, “Tamron Hall” scratched its scheduled program for the day, instead airing a rerun of its Monday “Eclipse” episode during its 10 a.m. slot.
At the top of the hour, Hall addressed the incident in a brief opening monologue.
“We have had something happen that’s never happened in the five seasons of the show. We are not able to air the show scheduled for today,” the Emmy Award-winning host said. “As my friend Bevy Smith says, ‘Sometimes life be lifeing,’ and that happened for us today.”
“Now, we’re in the clean-up phase,” she said, adding that the show’s planned week of fashion- and hairstyle-related programming would resume the next day.
After a tumultuous exit from NBC — and a brief business arrangement with disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein — Hall has gone on to become Disney’s second longest-running syndicated talk show host.
In her monologue, Hall thanked the responding firefighters and audience members, who were in a holding room at the time of the incident, assuring the TV audience that “everybody’s OK.”
She also revealed to viewers how she had planned to start the Wednesday broadcast — with the viral video clip of Lenny Kravitz’s intensive ab workout.
Instead, Hall said, “We had, you might say, a real smoke show around here.”
An hour later, the women of “The View” — which films next door to “Tamron Hall” at ABC Studios in Manhattan — walked onto their set to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” in a cheeky nod to the incident.
“This morning we had to evacuate the studio because there was a fire that we did not start,” host Whoopi Goldberg said on the show. “We don’t know who started it. We don’t know what started it.”
Whoopi Goldberg claimed she wasn’t “doubling down” on previous Holocaust comments. “I always stood with the Jewish people and always will,” she said.
Host Ana Navarro, who had called into the team’s regular “Hot Topics” meeting from the airport mid-commute, said, “I pressed the Zoom link, thinking I would find all of you on the Zoom, and it was dark, empty, an alarm, and flashing lights.”
“I thought, ‘Holy hell,’” she said.
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