MV Fire Crew Arrives to Help in Watsonville Blaze

An engine and a battalion chief from the Mountain View Fire Department joined four other crews from Santa Clara County in a mutual aid effort to help fight a blaze that consumed a cold storage facility in Watsonville, according to Mountain View Fire spokeswoman Jaime Garrett.

The warehouse fire burning in  is expected to consume the building.

"The building's gone," Watsonville  said around 9 a.m. Thursday. "This is a controlled burn-down. We're not trying to save the building."

The Santa Clara County strike team rolled in around 7 p.m. to take a 12-hour night shift doing fire management. Gilroy, Mountain View, Sunnyvale and Santa Clara County collaborated on the five-engine team.

The strike team, compromised of five engines from the various cities, were lead by Mountain View Battalion Chief Richard Alameda.

On Thursday evening, the fire continued to smolder through thousands of crates of apple cider. Small pops were bottles of juice exploded; fire extinguishers blew up.

The fire is expected to burn for at least three more days, said Bisbee, sleep-deprived from managing the fire attack overnight.

However, it is common practice for agencies to help one another in large fires.

 Overnight, the flames churned through the cavernous structure at 850 W. Beach St., fed by the materials used to construct the historic building—redwood mulch encased in concrete and cork.

The 1928 building in Watsonville's industrial district stored  300,000-400,000 cases—about $4 million worth—of Martinelli's apple cider and raw apples, according to John Martinelli, owner of S. Martinelli and Co. in Watsonville.

Late Wednesday and again Thursday morning, a crew of Martinelli's employees jockeyed forklifts and moved hundreds of pallets of product from areas still untouched by the fire.

On Thursday morning, the number of fire engines assigned to the warehouse blaze had been halved to eight. Three ladder trucks arrived at the scene and doused the building with water to control how the fire burned through the building, Bisbee said.

The fire started in a storage room in the back corner of the massive concrete structure.

Fire crews tried to rein in the flames, but the fire took off around midnight and tore through the building toward the West Beach Street side. Bisbee said it peeled off the roof; the advancing flames forced firefighters to back off and change tactics.

Cal Fire officials worked with Watsonville fire staff to coordinate the ongoing response, which will involve continued cooperation from fire agencies in Santa Cruz, Monterey and Santa Clara counties.

"It's a long-term incident," Cal Fire Battalion Chief Rob Sherman said.

Watsonville residents are advised to take precautions against the smoke, a thick, black haze that is billowing through town. People who have problems with the smoke have been advised to to stay indoors and close their windows, or get out of town for the weekend.

The long-term impact of the fire is not yet clear.

For Martinelli's, the company may fall shy of its cider needs in the fall, the time of year when product supplies naturally dwindle and harvest season approaches.

Insurance will cover the financial loss, "but we can't replace what's gone," Martinelli said. In addition to the flats of apple cider products, about 3,000 tons of apples were inside the storage facility when the fire broke out.

"Going into next fall, we're expecting to have some shortages," Martinelli said. Behind him, the hundreds of plastic, apple-shaped bottles of juice littered the ground and the fire smoldered in the background.

The company, which operates a bottling plant across from the destroyed cold storage, also will have to hunt for a new location to store its apples before the crushing or its products, post-production. Martinelli said he may look for warehouse space in Salinas and store apples in its facility.

"It's less than ideal," he said.

S. Martinelli and Co. opened in Watsonville in 1890 and began a symbiotic relationship with Apple Growers Ice & Cold Storage Co. when the facility opened in 1928.

"We certainly hope they rebuild," Martinelli said.