NEWPORT BEACH : Neighbors Battle Fires With Hoses

Neighbors armed with garden hoses battled to keep one house fire from spreading to another on their Newport Beach street Thursday night until firefighters could arrive.

“They really kept the flames from hitting my house,” said Olive Kirkpatrick, 60, referring to her neighbors, who helped to save her house in the 200 block of Orange Avenue.

Kirkpatrick said the fire began in a house next to hers about 8:30 p.m. while she and her husband were reading newspapers. “We heard a constant popping,” she said. “When we ran outside, the upstairs of the neighbor’s house was on fire.”

Kirkpatrick and her neighbors used four garden hoses to wet the side of her house before 29 firefighters from Newport Beach, Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach arrived. The firefighters took about 10 minutes to contain the blaze in neighbor Richard Sullivan’s house, which was burning too much for the garden hoses to make an impact.

Fire Department spokeswoman Bonny Hanson said the fire caused $30,000 damage to Sullivan’s house. Sullivan was not home when the blaze started. Hanson said the cause of the fire, which started in an upstairs office, is still being investigated.

The Kirkpatricks’ house, which is about six feet from the Sullivan residence, suffered burned eaves and broken windows.

“We’re really lucky,” said Kirkpatrick, adding that the roof of her house was destroyed three years ago in another fire. “I kept wondering whether it would happen again. The firemen said if they got there a minute later, our house would have caught fire.”