Fireworks Spark Fires and Calls to Ban Them

“This,” said Santina M. Mercuri, gesturing to what was left of her house in Tustin, “this is the Fourth of July.”

For Mercuri, it meant that her home of 20 years was all but destroyed during morning darkness Sunday after an unknown type of firework landed on her roof and set it aflame. She and her 90-year-old mother escaped, but the house at 1361 Mauna Loa Road suffered an estimated $100,000 in damage.

It was the fourth such fireworks-caused house fire in Orange County in little more than 24 hours, according to firefighters, and prompted some residents to call for an all-out ban on the sales and use of fireworks.

Saturday afternoon, Raj Vaithianathan and his family returned to their house in the 23700 block of Via Calzada in Mission Viejo to find their roof almost entirely burned away and the floor deep in rubble. Firefighters said that roof, too, had been set ablaze by a whistling “Piccolo Pete,” one of the so-called “safe and sane” fireworks variety. Damage there was estimated at $93,000.

Sparks from that fire set another roof aflame two doors up the street, causing another $3,000 in damage, firefighters said. Neighbors said the residents of that house had left for the weekend and would not learn of the fire until they returned Sunday night.

An illegal bottle rocket--like the kind that touched off a $2.5-million blaze that destroyed 94 apartments and left 130 people homeless at an Anaheim complex during the 1986 Fourth of July holiday--was blamed for starting a roof fire Sunday afternoon in Fountain Valley, city fire officials said.

Firefighters said they also suspected that fireworks ignited two large trees in a Newport Beach residential neighborhood, and caused a brush fire in Lake Forest.

No one was injured in any of the fires, but officials credited the work of an off-duty Tustin reserve police officer with quick action in notifying fire officials and residents in the early Sunday blaze in that city.

Residents in both Tustin and Mission Viejo expressed outrage on Sunday that fireworks can still be sold in parts of Orange County and can cause such major property damage.

“Fireworks should be outlawed,” Vaithianathan said Sunday. “Kids will be kids, and if you let them have a dangerous toy, they’ll play with it.”

Santina Mercuri, the owner of the Tustin home hit by the fireworks blaze in Tustin, said: “I think they (fireworks) should be outlawed completely. They shouldn’t allow it at all. Let them go to the park. But this is kind of ridiculous. We don’t have to celebrate this way.”

Safe-and-sane fireworks are legal in Mission Viejo, which is unincorporated and thus governed by the county Board of Supervisors. In the city of Tustin, however, fireworks of all types, except for controlled displays, are banned. Nonetheless, fireworks can be purchased in neighboring Santa Ana, and fire officials said they suspect youngsters playing with fireworks early Sunday morning near Mercuri’s Mauna Loa Road home led to that blaze.

Tustin Reserve Police Officer Mike Ryerson had come off duty and was on his way home about 3:45 a.m. Sunday, when he spotted billowing curls of smoke, Tustin police said. Ryerson tracked the smoke to Mauna Loa Road, where he saw the roof of a home flaming in the night sky, Lt. Walt Wedemeyer said.

“Officer Ryerson went to the home and alerted the residents, and then he notified the residents of the adjoining homes,” Wedemeyer said. “I think he did some heroic work there.”

Mercuri said that she and her elderly mother, Girolama Maisano, were just preparing to leave their burning home when Ryerson hammered on their door to notify them of the danger. The fire itself had alerted her just moments earlier, Mercuri said.

“I heard noise, like things falling,” she said. “It was like hail, but not quite. It was a weird sound.”

Mercuri said she looked out a window and saw an orange-colored glow coming from her house. She then tried to make an emergency telephone call, but found that both the telephone and the electricity weren’t working. “I said, ‘Mom, let’s go,’ ” she recalled Sunday afternoon, recounting how she and her mother made their way to the front door and to safety.

A neighbor, Pat Martin, said she and other neighbors were horrified upon awakening Sunday and seeing the roof of the Mercuri home on fire.

“I woke up and heard a crackling sound across the street,” Martin said. “I heard sirens, and I went to the window, and then I saw flames leaping out from the entire roof (across the street). “It was very scary, and I was concerned that the people might still be inside. I’m very worried about fires at this time of the year, especially since our roofs are shake roofs and are very dried out.”

Martin said she had been told that some children were playing with fireworks near a drainage ditch in the neighborhood earlier in the evening. “Fireworks are illegal in Tustin, but they’re not illegal in Santa Ana,” she said.

The Orange County Fire Department, which handled both the Mission Viejo and Tustin fires, has officially determined that both were caused by fireworks on the roof. The fire in Mission Viejo, which broke out about 1:20 p.m. Saturday, and the Sunday morning blaze in Tustin, were brought under control within 15 minutes, a spokesman for the county Fire Department said.

Jim Padilla and Glenn Pierce, neighbors living on Via Calzada in Mission Viejo, said Sunday that only quick work spraying water from garden hoses kept the fire from spreading and damaging more homes in the area.

Padilla said he and Pierce climbed onto Pierce’s roof and sprayed water on it after the Vaithianathan house nearby began to blaze. “I had to water myself with the water hose, the heat was so bad,” Padilla said.

Both men had run to the Vaithianathan home when they saw the first signs of fire, and both discovered that no one was at home. While waiting for firefighters to arrive, Pierce and Padilla said they tried unsuccessfully to quell the blaze at the Vaithianathan house with garden hoses. “It was like spitting,” said Pierce. When it became obvious that he couldn’t stop that fire, he and Padilla began spraying Pierce’s home.

The two neighbors said they are concerned about fireworks and fire danger. “The entire neighborhood is very much aware of the danger,” Pierce said.

“I hope they ban them; I’d ban them,” Padilla said. “People shoot them up in the air, and because they’re legal here, people come in with the illegal ones. You can’t tell unless a policeman comes by and checks them.”

Even the so-called safe-and-sane fireworks, such as the “Piccolo Pete” that apparently ignited his neighbor’s house, can be dangerous, they said. Pierce said he had seen youngsters igniting the devices in such a way as to make them fly into the air. “You light them, and they just burn,” he said. “But if you put them upside down, they take off like rockets.”

In Fountain Valley, firefighters suspect an illegal bottle rocket set fire to one wood-shake roof shortly before 5:35 p.m. Sunday, Battalion Chief John Bolstad said.

The blaze caused an estimated $500 damage to the roof of the home in the 17700 block of Santa Fe Circle, but no one was injured.

Bolstad said the owner of the home had just returned when he noticed what appeared to be a piece of charcoal in his front yard.

“He looked up and saw the smoke on his roof, and then called the Fire Department,” Bolstad said.

Youngsters had been seen playing with bottle rockets in the area before the fire, Bolstad said.

Two other fireworks-suspected blazes occurred in Orange County on Sunday, officials reported, but neither involved buildings. In Newport Beach, city firefighters extinguished a blaze in two large trees in the 2000 block of Toyon Lane. The burning trees were believed to have been ignited by fireworks about 11:30 a.m., fire officials said.

Several passers-by, including cab driver Chuck Dorris and Alan Pezzuto of Newport Beach, stopped to water down some of the wood-shingle roofs in the residential neighborhood when embers from the blazing trees began blowing wildly.

Firefighters were able to extinguish the flames before the fire spread to any nearby buildings, fire officials said.

Elsewhere at about the same time Sunday, fire crews with the county Fire Department extinguished a brush fire near the intersection of Trabuco Road and Lake Forest Drive in the Lake Forest area. While the cause of the blaze that was reported about 11:35 a.m. was not immediately determined, fireworks were suspected, a fire dispatcher said.

Times staff writer David Reyes contributed to this story.