GILROY
– Village Place residents grabbed garden hoses Friday to save
their neighbors’ houses from encroaching flames in a nearby
field.
GILROY – Village Place residents grabbed garden hoses Friday to save their neighbors’ houses from encroaching flames in a nearby field.
The neighbors didn’t know each other very well. The housing development at the west end of Luchessa Avenue is quite new, and many of the homeowners moved in earlier this year.
A fast-moving vegetation fire might have engulfed those homes Friday if residents hadn’t taken action and hosed down their and their neighbors’ wooden backyard fences.
Fire and police investigators suspect arson as the cause of the blaze, but they have no suspects. They said the blaze appeared to have begun at a homeless encampment on the south side of the nearby dry Uvas creekbed.
Winds quickly spread the flames south across the field, right up to the privacy fence surrounding the backyard of 6453 Village Place, the last address on the street. The outside of the fence was scorched, but the damage stopped there.
Greg Leach, who lives a few houses down, was the first to start watering down the fences. He said he was driving home with a friend when he saw the field on fire – far from the houses at that point, down by the creekbed. He called 9-1-1 from his cell phone and reported it, but after waiting a few minutes and not seeing firefighters, they “grabbed some hoses and said, ‘Let’s see what we can do.'”
The Gilroy Fire Department was a little delayed because they originally heard the fire was by the Uvas Creek levee and showed up on the opposite side of the creek, Acting Division Chief Ed Bozzo said. It was seven minutes after the 2:44 p.m. call before the first fire engine arrived on the correct scene, Bozzo said.
Leach said the fire was about 30 yards by 30 yards when he called it in, “but then the wind picked up and you know the rest.”
A California Department of Forestry airplane crew estimated the blaze’s total size at three acres, Bozzo said. GFD and CDF firefighters had it contained by 3:33 p.m. and then set to the task of mopping up the hot spots.
Joining Leach on the garden hose brigade were David Sepulveda, whose sister lives in the end house at 6453 Village Place, and Ron Colman, who lives next door.
Sepulveda ran to his sister’s house when he saw the flames threatening it. When he arrived, he said, burning embers had jumped the fence and landed on a concrete pad in the backyard. Leach was spraying the fence from the outside, and Sepulveda said he grabbed a hose and started dousing it from inside the yard. He said the flames came on so strong, however, that they had to retreat until firefighters arrived.
Colman was upstairs working on his computer when he heard the sirens. He looked out and saw the fire down by the creekbed, but then the wind picked up. Suddenly, it was right by his backyard.
“It was moving pretty quick,” Colman said. “You could see it blow right up the hill.”
Colman’s wife, Debbie, and their two sons were shopping on Tenth Street and saw the smoke from there.
“It looked like it was in the vicinity” of her home, she said, but it wasn’t until she arrived and found police blocking off her street that she got scared.
The Colmans and the Sepulvedas hadn’t met before the fire, but they got to know each other as their volunteer firefighting duty came to a close.
The leading topic of their conversation was how each family had previously worried about the fire danger posed by brush piles in the field. The Colmans said a city inspector took note of it when he came to check their new swimming pool.
“I like living down here, but (the brush) is starting to worry me,” Ron Colman said. “We need to do something about it.”
A billboard advertised the field as the future home of New Hope Community Church.
Peter Crowley covers public safety for The Dispatch. You can reach him at 847-7109 or pc******@************ch.com.
