SAN MARTIN
– State firefighters this morning continued to sift through the
blackened and charred remains of a house on Sycamore Avenue in San
Martin, trying to determine what caused the home to burn to the
ground Saturday night.
SAN MARTIN – State firefighters this morning continued to sift through the blackened and charred remains of a house on Sycamore Avenue in San Martin, trying to determine what caused the home to burn to the ground Saturday night.
No one was injured in the blaze, but the cause and origin are a puzzler, fire officials said. A day-and-a-half later, officials with the California Department of Forestry still couldn’t say much about the fire with certainty – not even who owns the house or whether it was inhabited at the time.
CDF firefighters responded at 9:29 p.m. Saturday to the house at 13987 Sycamore and found it fully engulfed in flame. Crews from the Gilroy, Santa Clara County and San Jose fire departments helped contain and extinguish the flames.
“When we got there, it was fully involved,” Gilroy Fire Department Capt. Colin Martin said. “It was a defensive fire. … It was basically a surround-and-drown situation.”
The burned house was “an older-style county home, two-story” Martin said.
The conflagration threatened a nearby house. Gilroy’s four-person fire crew climbed onto the roof of the neighboring house and knocked embers off its roof.
