More than 100 firefighters from the Los Angeles area were called at the Universal Studios site on Sunday in order to help put out a massive fire started earlier in the day. The terrible incident began at about 4:30 a.m. and it was only contained after about 10 hours of intense efforts.

During the intervention, according to an official report, four firefighters were injured but their condition has not yet been made available.

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. According to Ron Meyer, NBC Universal president and chief operating officer, who was quoted by the Associated Press, there are duplicates for most of the videos stored in different locations and luckly, "Nothing is lost forever," he said.

So far the preliminary investigation did not manage to determine the reason for the fire and an official estimate for the total damage has not yet been announced.

This is not the first fire-incident 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 a $25 million damage. The man responsable for the incident, one of the security guards, was sentenced to four years in jail.