I did not really notice the first siren that screamed by on the
evening of Wednesday, Jan. 2. We live less than a block south of
Gilroy’s most imposing fortification: our new police station.
Sirens speed past our house all the time.
I did not really notice the first siren that screamed by on the evening of Wednesday, Jan. 2. We live less than a block south of Gilroy’s most imposing fortification: our new police station. Sirens speed past our house all the time.
The second siren, less than a minute later, caused me to look up. The third, less than a minute after the second, brought me to the door in time to see a fire engine zooming south. I ran out to the front sidewalk and saw a pillar of smoke billowing up from the roof of Gateway School.
Gateway School occupies the eastern portion of the Glen View School campus, and serves the developmentally disabled students of South County. Now Gateway was hemmed in by fire trucks and patrol cars, and dwarfed by a column of acrid smoke.
I went back into the house and made the worst mistake of my week. I should have put on my shoes and jacket first, instead of first saying to our 17-year-old daughter Anne, “There’s a big fire over at Gateway.” Zip! She was out the door before I could even find my coat.
By the time I reached the corner, the police were blockading the street with flares, adding the scent and glare of burning perchlorate to the smoke and glare of the scene. I walked west one block, then returned and walked south one block, slowly scanning the fire and the spectators thereof, in hopes of seeing my peripatetic daughter. No dice.
So I returned to my corner, watching the fire fighters at work, praying to keep my vague unreasoning fears at bay, and talking to my neighbors.
“Cual es? La preschool?” asked a lady in a white bathrobe.
“No, it’s Gateway,” I responded glumly. “Poor kids, now they have no school.”
“Pobrecitos,” she agreed. “The guy that did this is sick!”
I hope that it is determined that the fire was started accidentally. But there have been so many arson fires in Gilroy in recent months that it is easy to suspect the worst. Fires started by careless kids are bad enough, especially at a time when our school district is facing major shortfalls. Fires started by an arsonist are worse; arsonists are crazy. They are not amenable to reason.
I felt very ignorant about the mysteries of fire fighting as I watched and listened. I heard breaking glass … Were the firefighters breaking windows? Why? I heard a chainsaw … What was that for? Flashlights played round the building and on the smoke.
Presently I saw an unmistakable figure cross the street from Glen View to our block, and our daughter came tripping up the street toward me.
“Where have you been? I was so worried.”
Anne had been watching the fire from Glen View’s playing field, with several of our neighbors, one of whom had a police scanner with him. She had seen flames coming out of the windows on the south side of the central building.
After the fire fighters had extinguished those flames, they began smashing windows and prying open doors on the west side, apparently to let the smoke out – lots of heavy, dark smoke. Then they started smashing windows on the south side, but flames began shooting out of those windows again.
The fire fighters used hoses to put out the renewed flames, then used ladders to climb up to the roof from the west side. The smoke was so thick that Anne could not see clearly, but it looked and sounded as though the fire fighters were cutting holes in the roof with a chain saw.
The neighbor with the scanner reported that there had been an earlier fire in a dumpster at the corner of Fairview and Ninth. By this time, Anne had been standing with bare feet in wet grass for 40 minutes, so she headed toward home, collecting me on the way.
The fire fighters labored on, and by morning the fire trucks and patrol cars had vanished from the Gateway parking lot. The school looked almost normal from the front, except for the drifts of fire retardant.
If it is an arsonist, I hope he is arrested soon.
