Smoke from a fire outside its building brought trading on the floor of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange to a halt for approximately two hours earlier today.
The floor of the exchange was evacuated shortly after 11 a.m. when smoke filled the first floor of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange building at 19th and Market streets in downtown Philadelphia.
Firefighters who arrived on the scene soon afterward determined that the smoke was pulled into the building from a leaf fire that had ignited outside it by its ventilation system. The Philadelphia Fire Department extinguished the leaf blaze at 11:37 a.m.
Traders were allowed back into the building shortly before noon. All smoke was cleared from the trading floor by 12:05 p.m., and trading on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange resumed around 12:30 p.m., NASDAQ OMX said in a statement this afternoon.
The Philadelphia Stock Exchange is the nation's oldest, founded in 1790. Although it abandoned equities trading in the 1980s, it is one of the nation's largest options trading floors, with an automated trading system that remained functional throughout the disruption in floor trading. The NASDAQ stock exchange acquired the Philadelphia Stock Exchange in 1998 and incorporated it into its NASDAQ OMX options trading business.
Written by Sandy Smith
For HULIQ.com
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