Fire Destroys Girls’ Gymnasium at Brea-Olinda; No One Is Injured

A fire that destroyed the girls’ gymnasium at Brea-Olinda High School on Monday night also wiped out physical education offices, memorabilia, athletic equipment and uniforms.

The fire started in the basement and spread through all three levels of the gym, fire officials said. No one was in the gym, and there were no injuries. Greg Edmonson, Brea fire department captain, said the cause of the fire had not been determined.

Brea’s varsity softball team had to borrow uniforms and equipment from the Brea Bobby Sox League and was able to play its scheduled game with Western Tuesday afternoon.

Brea-Olinda students and faculty were saddened to see the 59-year-old building gutted.

“One of my seniors said, ‘Coach, we ran a lot of lines (for conditioning) in that gym,’ ” said Mark Trakh, girls’ basketball coach. “It was a pretty old gym. There was a lot of nostalgia. When you went inside, it looked like where they filmed the movie ‘Hoosiers.’ It’s kind of sad.”

Trakh said that the Wildcats’ new uniforms, worth $4,000, were destroyed, but that their Southern Section championship banner from 1986 and other effects were stored in the boys’ gym, which was not damaged.

Bill Brown, a physical education teacher and former football coach, said the Wildcats lost football helmets, shoulder pads, blocking pads, sled pads and an assortment of gymnastics equipment, which was stored in the gym’s basement.

“We don’t even know yet (the full extent of the losses),” Brown said. “In the basement, we stored tennis nets, a pitching machine. We lost all of our (football) film the last few years, except for last season. Eventually we’ll come up with a price. We’ll get all that stuff back if the insurance is right.

“The girls have a lot of sentiment in there. A lot of their records were lost, some of the traditional things they had.”

A more pressing problem to the Brea-Olinda physical education department, according to Brown and Trakh, is the loss of available class space.

“We lost the gym, the (girls’) weight room and the wrestling room and we lost all the space for the girls to dress,” Brown said. “We’re looking at a year and a quarter of some really creative planning.”

The school is scheduled to move into a new campus adjacent to the 57 freeway at Lambert Road beginning in the fall of 1989. Currently, the school is at 803 Birch Street, directly across from the Brea Mall.

“It means it’s going to be awfully crowded in the other gym,” said Trakh, whose Wildcats are annually among the top-ranked teams in the Southern Section 3-A polls.

“The boys’ coach (Rick Jones) used to joke about how could other schools do it with only one gym,” Trakh said. “Practice time is going to be brutal.”

Added Brown: “I feel very sorry for the girls. They’ll have to bear the brunt of this.”