A Fishing Town’s Fiery Scandal : Coverup Charges Inflame Crescent City After Firefighters Torch Pier

Dutton Dock, a rickety, disused pier at the foot of B Street, was a civic carbuncle--”rotted and unsafe even for pedestrian traffic in many areas,” a consultant concluded.

Not only was the 37-year-old dock blocking construction of a new sport-fishing pier intended to reverse the city’s sagging fortunes, it was a fire hazard that vandals had twice set ablaze earlier this year.

So when state and federal regulators refused to allow immediate demolition--requiring instead the usual months-long permit process--the City Council voted unanimously to tell the local volunteer Fire Department to ignore any new fires on the pier.

The next night, July 7, Dutton Dock went up in flames.

Feeding the Flames

It might have been written off as a fortuitous coincidence, except for one thing: When a local reporter arrived to cover the inferno, he noticed three men pouring a flammable liquid on the fire. The men feeding the flames, he learned, were volunteer firefighters.

Reporter Martin Kelly’s article in the next day’s Eureka Times-Standard chronicled the work of the fire-setting firefighters. It also sparked a wide-ranging criminal investigation--and, allegedly, an attempted cover-up--that has shaken this scenic little fishing town and its 3,000 residents.

It is a story that more than a few people here compare with recent Washington scandals--a story of zealous men who skirted the law and of deception at the highest level of government, a tale of an uncompromising prosecutor and an intrepid reporter. Incriminating tape recordings have even played a role.

It also is a story that some local residents dismiss as nothing more than small-town politicking, with relatively innocuous events blown out of scale by conflicting personalities and clashing egos.

The Del Norte County Grand Jury in August poured its own kind of fuel on the controversy by indicting Mayor C. Ray Smith, Fire Chief Don Olson and the seaside city’s only plainclothes police detective, Virginia Anthony. The felony charges range from obstruction of justice to, in Olson’s case, actually participating in starting the fire.

The day after the indictments, three firefighters who already had admitted setting the fire were sentenced to 30 days’ house arrest and three years’ probation.

“All this came to light during the Iran- contra hearings, and here we had the very same kind of thing--people, elected leaders, taking the law into their own hands. It is incredible,” said Crescent City resident Karen Brohmer.

“A lot of people come here to get away from bureaucracy and regulations. We even have a local saying, ‘There is no law north of the Klamath (River).’ I guess it must be true.”

‘We All Have to Obey Laws’

But not if Dist. Atty. Doug Nareau has anything to say about it.

“We all have to obey the laws,” he said flatly.

“A lot of these people were popular people-- are popular people,” said Nareau, a former assistant district attorney who took office in January after running unopposed for the top prosecutor’s job. “What bothers most people is the cover-up. Nobody really cares about the pier--that’s ‘So what?’ But nobody likes government cover-ups.

“I think people feel that if they got caught, they should have taken their medicine and it would have all been over by now.”

Kelly, the reporter who broke the story, believes that speedy admissions of error might even have meant that no one would have had to take any medicine at all.

“If our noble mayor and fire chief had acknowledged everything the next day, it would have been two stories--the pier burned down and some firemen goofed,” he said. “But they tried to cover it up and that was their big mistake.”

Rick McClendon, a Crescent City lawyer representing Anthony, is among those who think there was no mistake, at least not by those who have been charged.

“You’ve heard that story about using a sledgehammer to kill a fly?” he said. “Well, this is a case of burning trash without a license--something usually handled with a $15 fine--resulting in felony indictments. It never should have happened.”

The story began on July 6, when the City Council met at its regular weekly session to discuss decisions by the California Coastal Commission, the Regional Water Quality Control Board and Army Corps of Engineers not to grant emergency permits for the city to destroy Dutton Dock by fire.

Pollution experts were worried about water contamination from the pier’s creosote wood preservative; engineers feared that debris falling into the harbor could endanger fishing boats. These matters, they decided, required more study under the normal permit process.

Big Insurance Bill

This upset the City Council, records show, in part because the dock was frequented by transients and vandals--thus costing the financially strapped city $85,000 a year in liability insurance.

The rotting wooden pier also stood in the way of tourist-oriented redevelopment of the downtown area, much of which never has recovered from a huge 1964 tidal wave that flushed much of the city out to sea.

Council members voted to pursue all the needed permits but added that the city would not respond to any future fire on the pier because it would be too expensive and too dangerous for the 30-member volunteer Fire Department.

That order was transmitted to the firefighters the next night, at their monthly meeting at the firehouse two blocks from City Hall. It is still unclear exactly what the fire chief and the mayor, who is himself a volunteer firefighter, said to the fire crew.

However, the firefighters followed their meeting with a traditional steak barbecue and bull session. As some of them waited to put a match to charcoal briquettes, Battalion Chief Richard T. Wier, 33, said he and two other firefighters--First Assistant Chief Arnold R. Delgadillo, 55, and Fireman Michael A. Horner, 33--decided to put a match to the pier.

Fatality Feared

“Someday somebody was going to lose their life out there--no doubt about it,” Wier said, explaining why he and his colleagues decided to torch the old structure. “Either a little kid was going to fall through some rotten spot or a firefighter was going to lose his life.

“I realize there are laws and everyone has to abide by them, but . . . I am willing to take the consequences of this rather than have to attend somebody’s funeral.”

At 10 p.m., Wier said he and his two colleagues drove to the pier, inspected its two abandoned fish-buying shacks to make sure they were empty and set out flares at the entrance to keep people away. They then splashed a mixture of gasoline and diesel fuel on the wooden pier’s deck and set it ablaze.

They had not been drinking beer or any other alcohol at the barbecue, Wier said. The decision to burn the pier, he said, was made calmly and rationally in what he and his two colleagues believed were in the best interests of the city. He stressed that they were not acting on orders from the mayor, the fire chief or anyone else.

Despite an initial flash, Wier said the first fire they set was doing so poorly that they returned about an hour later to start a second blaze. “Otherwise it would have taken forever to burn,” he explained.

Part-Time Reporter

That return engagement, however, had an audience. Kelly, a part-time Crescent City correspondent for the daily paper in Eureka, 80 miles south of here, had come to watch the dock fire, which had been noticed by a routine police patrol.

Despite the political heat generated by Kelly’s article the next afternoon, the mayor and fire chief stood by what Olson had told the reporter the night of the blaze: The firefighters were merely setting a “back fire” to contain the original blaze.

In the meantime, Wier is quoted in a probation report as telling district attorney’s investigators that “the city told the defendants not to say anything--they’d take care of everything.”

Even before the district attorney began his probe, the mayor, fire chief and Detective Anthony had said they would look into the fire. After only one day, Anthony was withdrawn from the case by the fire chief and Police Chief Nick Potoroff. The police chief replaced her.

This city investigation concluded that the initial fire was of unknown origin and that the second fire was set as a back fire, as Fire Chief Olson had explained. Wier said the conclusion was reached even though none of the investigators ever discussed the events of that night with him or the other two men who had set the fires.

The mayor, Wier said, had “opened his mouth without thinking first.” The fire chief, he added, “was caught between a rock and a hard place.”

Willing to Talk

The truth about the fire emerged largely because those who set the blaze--Wier, a funeral director; Delgadillo, a bakery sales manager, and Horner, a bakery sales representative--were more than willing to talk candidly to anyone who was interested. That included the district attorney and grand jury members. The volunteer firefighters said they still do not believe they were wrong to have torched the pier.

On July 28 the firefighters each pleaded no contest, the legal equivalent of admitting guilt, to one misdemeanor count of unlawful burning. State Fire Marshal Monty McGill had concluded earlier that the pier fire technically was not an act of arson because it was not maliciously or recklessly set.

When the firefighters admitted their action, many people here thought the whole affair was over. But on that same day, the district attorney turned the attention of the county grand jury away from the crime and toward its alleged cover-up.

News of the new investigation spread, as news tends to do in a small town, and residents waited anxiously for a conclusion. Many were surprised when the investigation ended with the felony indictments.

Destroying Tapes

Smith, the part-time mayor who earns his living working for a local dairy, is accused of perjuring himself before the grand jury. He is also accused of conspiring to cover up the cause of the fire and trying to destroy tapes on which the firefighters acknowledged what they had done. The district attorney will not discuss publicly what tapes are involved.

Olson, the part-time fire chief who works full time as the city’s building inspector, is charged with conspiring with Smith to cover up the true cause of the fire. In addition, Olson is accused of actually helping to set fire to the old dock.

Anthony, the police detective, is accused of aiding in the alleged cover-up conspiracy, obstructing Potoroff’s investigation and lying to the grand jury.

All three people, speaking through their lawyers, declined to discuss the case.

Ironically, the indictments were handed down less than an hour after the city learned that the Coastal Commission had approved a permit to burn the pier legally.

Some local residents look at that news--as well as the danger posed by the old dock and the city’s desperate need to cope with the decline of the local timber and fishing industries by attracting tourists--and wonder about all the fuss.

“They were going to burn it down anyway,” said a woman named Patricia who declined to give her last name, “so why are they all making such a big deal about it now?”