GILROY
– A shipping yard fire and a 90-minute power outage Tuesday
night shared the same cause – a driver who slammed a car into a
telephone box and a set of power pole support cables at the east
end of Luchessa Avenue.
The driver fled the scene before police officers and
firefighters arrived, and police had not apprehended the motorist
as of press time.
GILROY – A shipping yard fire and a 90-minute power outage Tuesday night shared the same cause – a driver who slammed a car into a telephone box and a set of power pole support cables at the east end of Luchessa Avenue.
The driver fled the scene before police officers and firefighters arrived, and police had not apprehended the motorist as of press time. The Oldsmobile sedan, which was left behind, appeared to have gone off the road on the curve where northbound Rossi Lane becomes westbound Luchessa.
Meanwhile, firefighters spent about eight hours Tuesday night and this morning battling a blazing mass of cardboard outside a Luchessa Avenue trucking warehouse.
When the car hit the support cables at 9:19 p.m., it appeared to have pushed them hard enough to make the adjacent power pole lean, according to Verizon phone officials at the scene this morning. Because of this, one or two of the electric lines dipped low enough to touch a metal light pole, shorting out the system and causing sparks to fall on a hedge of juniper bushes below and light them on fire. Junipers are full of oily sap and burn quickly and hot, according to fire officials.
The bushes in turn lit stacked piles of bound, flattened cardboard boxes and wooden pallets being stored outside Trevis Berry Transportation Inc. at 655 Luchessa, east of the U.S. 101 overpass.
Firefighters managed to keep the flames from reaching Trevis Berry’s large warehouse, which was next to the burning cardboard.
A man who would not give his name said he witnessed the fire’s early stages, when the flames were spreading from the bushes to the cardboard.
“I was on my way home,” he said. “One of the employees from Trevis Berry had a garden hose and was trying to put out,” he said.
This witness said he tried to help, but by the time he got out of his vehicle and jumped the fence, “The heat was too intense. … About 10 pallets of cardboard were already on fire.”
Eighteen Gilroy firefighters and 15 from the California Department of Forestry doused the flaming cardboard but made little progress extinguishing it until they started pulling it apart with long, two-pronged rakes.
“The problem is, you’ve got cardboard that is tightly packed, and you’ve also got wooden pallets,” Gilroy Fire Department Division Chief Phil King said. “It takes a lot of people power to pull that stuff apart.”
Firefighters also patrolled the roof of the Trevis Berry building, dousing the many embers that flew onto the roof from the burning cardboard.
Firefighters finally got the blaze contained at about 2 a.m. and didn’t extinguish it until about 5, fire Capt. Mark Ordaz said this morning.
A Trevis Berry manager initially called in the fire, according to fire officials. Trevis Berry himself was at the scene but declined to comment.
The outage affected 1,170 Pacific Gas & Electric customers, company spokesman Jeff Smith said this morning. PG&E restored power to all but 28 of those customers by 11 p.m., Smith said; those 28 regained power at about 5:30 this morning.
No one reported seeing the car go off the road, but one witness told police he saw a man running from the area of the car around the time the fire started, police said.
Police have determined the car’s registered owner and are investigating, Sgt. John Sheedy said this morning.
