A two-alarm fire threatened two homes Wednesday and crept within
500 feet of the new Las Animas Elementary School in west
Gilroy.
Gilroy – A two-alarm fire threatened two homes Wednesday and crept within 500 feet of the new Las Animas Elementary School in west Gilroy.
The 6:05pm fire damaged a fence surrounding a house in the Villagio housing development and charred three acres of a grassy lot owned by the New Hope Community Church. All three Gilroy Fire Department engines, two airplanes, a helicopter, two South Santa Clara County Fire District engines and CalFire responded to the blaze, which they attacked from three sides and contained by 7:38pm.
“It’s the same every year,” said Shannon Sepulveda, a Villagio resident and sister-in-law of Terry Ferrigno, whose fence was burned. “There have been fires there every summer.”
Ferrigno has lived in her house at the end of Village Place for three years. The first year her family moved in, a fire in the same lot damaged the same fence. Still, she was rattled by the blaze.
“That was a very close call,” she said.
Ferrigno and her 14-year-old son doused the flaming fence with their garden hose before fire crews arrived. During that time, more than 75 neighbors gathered at the end of the street to gawk at the smoke plume, which rose hundreds of feet into the air.
Next door neighbor Debbie Colmon, whose 15-year-old son Nick was out playing basketball at the end of the street when the blaze started and who dialed 911 to report the fire, has been surprised by the frequency of the fires.
“We didn’t even think about it when we moved in here,” she said.
Colmon, Ferrigno and neighbors hold the church at fault for not clearing the grass in the lot.
“Everybody calls and they do absolutely nothing about the brush,” Sepulveda said.
The fire likely started on the north side of the church’s field, across from the houses, and was swept south by the wind, said Division Chief Ed Bozzo. The fire department had identified the field as a hazard and asked the church to cut the brush months earlier, he said.
“It’s just trying to get the people to comply right now,” he added.
Nobody at the church could be reached by press time.
After identifying the field as a hazard, fire crews planned how they would put out a fire on the property. Therefore, their response was quick and concerted when it occurred, Bozzo said.
The blaze comes on the heels of a barn fire in San Martin Monday and fires across California, including one in South Lake Tahoe that has burned since Sunday. It also comes a week before Independence Day, when the threat of fires is traditionally higher. Conditions that fueled the blaze include a lack of rain and abundant winds, Bozzo said.
“It’s just like the rest of the state,” he said.
Firefighters and residents were lucky that the blaze started in the evening, when winds had died down, Division Chief Phil King said. Winds were blowing about 5mph in the evening, compared to 15mph earlier in the day, with gusts up to 20mph, meteorologists at the National Weather Service in Monterey reported.
“If this was one o’clock, this would be a different ball game,” he said.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
