Aug. 19--SAN JOSE -- Coming from a family of firefighters, Arlene Mortenson knew the tower of smoke and flame she saw from the freeway as she drove home with her son and a friend 10 years ago was a major disaster in the making.
Santana Row, now San Jose's go-to destination for upscale shopping and dining but still under construction at the time, had erupted in a monstrous blaze that rained fiery embers on nearby homes and apartments and tested the city's fire department like never before.
"It was just incredible," recalled Mortenson, 51, of Campbell, who, out of curiosity, stopped at a Winchester Boulevard restaurant down the street from the burning Santana Row site on Aug. 19, 2002. "You could just see the flames shooting into the sky. You could hear explosion after explosion, just like, BOOM! BOOM! Stuff started catching on fire all around us, and then my son started freaking out, so we left."
The Santana Row fire went to 11 alarms and became the worst in San Jose's history. The San Jose Fire Department -- forced for the first time to seek help from outside Santa Clara County -- called in more than 200 firefighters and 70 trucks, engines and other vehicles from San Jose and 11 other departments.
The smoke and flames caused more than $100 million in damage to the shopping center site, and falling embers that ignited roofs half a mile away destroyed more than 30 apartments and townhouses in the Moorpark neighborhood, causing $2.5 million
in damage.
Despite the immense danger and challenge of battling fires on two fronts, no one was seriously hurt.
Fire officials were never able to determine exactly how the blaze started. But they noted that large construction sites are vulnerable to catastrophic fires before sprinkler systems, drywall and other fireproofing are added to protect the wooden framing.
The city's fire chief at the time, Manuel Alarcon, was justifiably proud of the success his chronically understaffed department -- along with firefighters who rushed to help from as far as San Mateo County -- had in containing the catastrophe and limiting the damage.
"When I saw the amount of fire burning, I thought it was amazing there wasn't more damage," said San Jose fire Chief William McDonald, who was then chief in Fremont. "I was very impressed."
But Alarcon struck a sour chord in public meetings with residents who had watched their homes and keepsakes burn while a handful of firefighters called frantically for backup. They thought he was dismissive of their assertion that the firefighting response was far from perfect. Five months later, Alarcon retired, ending a 26-year career.
In fact, the fire exposed significant shortcomings in local firefighters' ability to effectively respond to such an unfolding disaster, problems that today's chiefs say have long since been corrected.
An analysis by this newspaper of the Aug. 19 fire dispatch tapes and interviews with witnesses found that the first wave of firefighters in Moorpark quickly realized they could not contain the fast-spreading fires. But they were repeatedly turned down when calling for backup, which records showed took half an hour to arrive.
Among the problems was that under existing "mutual aid" protocols, the city was forced to summon help from fire stations in cities miles away, where they had to battle rush-hour traffic, even though there were firefighters and engines closer to the scene. The rules aimed to avoid emptying out fire stations and leaving them unable to respond to other emergencies.
Changes since then allow the closer stations to send more of their firefighters and engines instead of holding some back, while departments summoned for help from farther away send their crews to those stations instead of all the way to the fire.
Radio communication also proved balky in the Santana Row fire. Channels overloaded, different departments didn't share the same frequencies, and battalion chiefs ended up using cellphones. Countywide emergency communications have since been upgraded with modern technology to allow emergency responders to communicate with one another.
"My confidence is extremely high that with the system today, you would not see the same kind of issues that may have arisen in 2002," said Santa Clara County fire Chief Kenneth Kehmna, the fire and rescue mutual aid coordinator for Santa Clara County.
Some issues remain a concern. San Jose already had one of the leanest big-city fire departments in the country when the Santana Row site burst aflame. After years of budget cuts amid a struggling economy, it's even leaner today.
While that doesn't necessarily mean the city and surrounding departments can't handle another big blaze, it makes it harder for them to respond to other calls coming at the same time.
"That I think is someplace where we're still vulnerable today," said Dustin DeRollo, a mayoral staffer at the time of the Santana Row fire, who now works as a consultant whose clients include the city firefighters union and whose neighborhood fire station was shuttered by the budget ax. "These large-scale events, they drain a lot of resources. You're still going to have major accidents, heart attacks, and our ability as a city to handle those (has been) severely hampered."
McDonald said that "all things being equal, I'd say we're better off and better able (to) handle the major incidents" but acknowledged that "we'd still be significantly overwhelmed."
For residents who lost homes and belongings, the blaze is now a distant memory. Laurel Fierro had returned to her Moorpark apartment with her kindergarten-age daughter at the time and found it in flames. They spent a week in a hotel with Red Cross vouchers, later returned to an apartment in the complex and have since moved to a home in Morgan Hill.
"It was definitely a difficult period," Fierro, 35, said. "The personal mementos -- you'll never get those back. But we got a lot of help from the community, and that really made a difference."
Mortenson lived near enough to the scene at the time that she found ashes in her yard when she got home and knew that she and her son, now 20, had witnessed something historic.
"I still have chunks of ash from that fire," Mortenson said, "in a little trinket box in my computer room."
Contact John Woolfolk at 408-975-9346. Follow him at Twitter.com/johnwoolfolk1.
Copyright 2012 - San Jose Mercury News
