By RUSS OLIVO

WOONSOCKET — Emergency crews evacuated two patients from a basement catheterization lab at Landmark Medical Center Thursday when a fire broke out in an elevator motor on the roof of the Cass Avenue hospital, four stories above them, officials said.

The patients were never in any danger, but they were moved to an area outside the hospital to avoid possible exposure to smoke, said Landmark President Richard Charest. The smoke never reached the cath lab, located opposite a bank of elevators in the basement,  but it did pour through most of the elevator shaft and waft into the common areas adjacent to the elevator doors on all four levels of the hospital, he said.
Though no one was injured and the fire was described as “a minor incident” by Deputy Fire Chief Thomas F. Williams, an atmosphere of high anxiety briefly permeated the hospital as the episode triggered a full-scale emergency response. Fire trucks and police cars jammed the entrance to the Cass Avenue hospital, and a phalanx of reporters later descended on the facility for a hastily arranged press conference in the lobby.
The fire, reported at 11:51 a.m., broke out in what Williams described as an “elevator shack” on the roof of the  hospital, a 10- by 10-foot brick enclosure housing a generator that provides electrical power for some of the hospital’s elevators, including two that empty into the wing adjacent to the reception area. The fire was confined to the generator motor and was probably caused by excessive electrical demand on the unit, said Williams.
“When firefighters arrived they encountered a smoky condition,” said Williams. “The fire was knocked down within five minutes. Smoke spread through the shaft and began entering the common areas.”
The two patients were removed from the hospital as a precaution, said Williams. They were relocated to the an area outside the hospital, directly adjacent to the cath lab, while a an ambulance crew and an engine company stood by. There was no smoke visible in or around the cath lab, said Williams, but there was a detectable odor of smoke.
The smoke didn’t travel much beyond the common areas outside the elevator doors on the various levels of the hospital because those areas were sealed off by “smoke doors” that closed automatically when the hospital’s alarms sounded, said Williams.
After the fire was out, emergency crews vented the smoke from the building with large exhaust fans and, save for a ribbon of yellow “do-not-cross” tape slung across a pair of elevator doors on the ground floor, the goings-on the hospital seemed to have returned to normal within a half-hour of the fire department’s arrival. About 110 patients were staying in the hospital when the fire broke out, officials said.
“The smoke went down to the elevator shaft, but the fire was never a threat to any patient in the building,” said Williams. “It was confined right to that motor in the generator.”
Because Landmark Medical Center is considered a “high-hazard” facility, the Woonsocket Fire Department already has a plan mapped out for responding to emergencies at the facility, said Williams. Four engines, two ladder trucks and a rescue squad were dispatched to the hospital for an initial response.
William Fischer, spokesman for Landmark Medical Center, said the hospital was still in the process of trying to calculate the extent of the damage. He said there were other elevators in the hospital that were unaffected by the fire and which will still be in use during repairs.
Fischer said the hospital never closed its doors during the incident and operations were continuing as usual. He and Charest both praised  the Woonsocket Fire Department, saying firefighters’ response to the incident was just about perfect.
“We have an emergency response plan in place and it went off flawlessly,” said Fischer. “Everything went off without a hitch.”
A 214-bed, acute care facility, Landmark Medical Center is currently operating under the terms of a  “special mastership,” akin to receivership, after the hospital petitioned the Superior Court for protection from creditors while it searched for an acquisition partner about a year ago. There have been reports that officials from the Boston-based Caritas Christi network of health care centers have toured the hospital recently, but so far court-appointed overseers have declined to confirm the network’s interest and say a merger announcement is weeks away, at best.
At this time last year, Landmark was predicting the financial meltdown of the hospital if an acquisition partner were not identified by now, but officials now say the collapse of the hospital is no longer an imminent threat.