Gilroy
– Gilroy Fire Department officials suspect someone is
intentionally lighting fires in the Uvas creekbed – fires like one
the department fought at about 11:30 last Friday night, shortly
after the season-opening football game at nearby Gilroy High
School.
Gilroy – Gilroy Fire Department officials suspect someone is intentionally lighting fires in the Uvas creekbed – fires like one the department fought at about 11:30 last Friday night, shortly after the season-opening football game at nearby Gilroy High School.
It was the ninth vegetation fire since June in the creekbed vicinity, including the area around west Luchessa Avenue and Thomas Road, according to acting GFD Division Chief Ed Bozzo.
“They’ve all been suspicious,” Bozzo said.
Friday’s blaze burned dense vegetation in a roughly 90-by-60-foot area on the high school side of the creek, deep in the thick growth behind the school’s practice field, according to Bozzo.
Fire investigators combed the scene but “couldn’t find any source of ignition,” he said.
An accidental cause would probably leave evidence, such as the remnants of a homeless person’s campfire or the charred filter of a cigarette butt. Fire investigators are generally able to find such things – Fire pits are obvious and cigarette butts “typically don’t burn up all the way,” Bozzo said – but their careful search turned up nothing.
That points to arson, Bozzo said, especially considering that the other eight fire investigations had the same result.
Bozzo said the GFD has ruled out natural causes for the fires. There have been no lightning storms, and there are no electrical lines near the fires’ origins.
It’s now the driest time of the year, the potential for fire damage is high, and the GFD is working with arson-trained city police officers to try to catch an arsonist. They have no suspects yet, Bozzo said.
“The only pattern we’ve been able to determine so far is that most of them have been at night,” Bozzo said.
In fact, he said, all the fires have been in the cool of the evening or at night except one, the biggest, which consumed three acres of vegetation on the creek’s south side and threatened new homes in a development off Luchessa. The flames erupted on the afternoon of Aug. 6 and came right up to several houses’ wooden backyard fences.
That fire is arguably the most serious to take place in the Uvas Creek vicinity in recent memory. Portions of Christmas Hill Park burned in the 1980s, Bozzo said, but no houses were threatened.
