Freeman said that an interdepartmental inquiry into the fire would be completed by June 13.
He said investigators will also look into whether the back lot sets, which have burned before, could be made of less combustible materials. The wood and plastic fed 100-foot flames that quickly moved into the adjacent "King Kong" building and a video library containing thousands of copies of movies and TV shows.
The fire, which turned a two-block area of the back lot into smoldering ruins, was not fully extinguished until 10 p.m. Sunday. More than 400 firefighters from the county and surrounding cities fought the blaze, which pumped out a huge column of black smoke that drifted across the San Fernando Valley.
On Monday morning, 40 to 50 firefighters were still dousing hot spots and looking for embers.
The fire affected about 3 1/2 acres of the 391-acre park, Universal said, with damage estimated in the millions of dollars.
A Universal spokesman said the studio would replace the New York Street backdrops and an animatronic King Kong destroyed by the fire. Park officials plan to reroute the studio's popular tram ride around fire-damaged sets to areas untouched by the flames.
The park's 30 soundstages were not damaged by the fire, Universal said, and 10 scheduled productions were still filming Monday.
Freeman said that during the 1990 back lot fire, "water supply was a challenge" as well, but not to the same degree as Sunday.
After that fire, Universal installed a heavy-duty sprinkler system designed to drench the sets in case of fire. Firefighters reported seeing water flow Sunday, Freeman said, but were uncertain whether it was coming from the sprinklers or from burst pipes.
At a Monday afternoon news conference, Freeman said it was too soon to draw conclusions about the low water pressure.
"At this point it is premature to say that there was a weak link," he said. "It may be that the large size of the fire was the issue."
Universal Studios Hollywood representatives declined to comment about the water-pressure issues.
Universal Music Group, an unrelated company, leased space in one of the video library vaults for master copies of reel-to-reel audiotapes of music from the 1940s and 1950s, but all of the archive had been copied, much of it digitally, as the site was being phased out, a spokesman said Monday, "so in a sense nothing was lost."
Preliminary results of air tests at Universal Studios' smoky back lots Sunday found levels of benzene and other toxic contaminants six times or more above normal.
At those levels, firefighters and anyone else in the immediate vicinity of the blaze could have experienced respiratory irritation, South Coast Air Quality Management District spokesman Sam Atwood said. But Atwood added that the measurements were far below the limits for serious health effects from short-term exposure.
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andrew.blankstein@latimes.com
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bettina.boxall@latimes.com
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garrett.therolf@latimes.com
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Times staff writers Janet Wilson and Robert Lopez contributed to this story.
