Fire Destroys Empty Bank Building; Investigators Call It Arson : Crime: Laguna Hills structure had been shut down for years because of ground contamination, apparently from nearby gasoline tanks.

A fire that authorities believe was intentionally set Wednesday destroyed part of an abandoned Laguna Hills bank building that has been the focus of a legal battle over the cleanup of an underground gasoline spill.

“We are calling it arson,” said Orange County Fire Department spokesman Capt. Dan Young. The blaze, which broke out at 3:15 a.m., burned the east wing of the boarded up Saddleback National Bank at the intersection of El Toro Road and Avenida de la Carlota.

“Investigators came out (of the gutted portion of the bank and office complex) shaking their heads,” Young said.

The L-shaped bank building has been vacant since 1982, said Ross Tanner, a spokesman for San Diego-based Home Federal Savings & Loan Assn., which bought the property in 1981.

Since the 1983 discovery of an extensive gasoline and diesel fuel leak from underground tanks of a nearby service station, the savings and loan has not been able to develop the land or sell it, Tanner said.

“It certainly is costing thousands of dollars a day,” Tanner said, adding that the company sold the property in 1985 and was later forced to take it back because of the contaminated soil.

The company has since filed a lawsuit to recoup losses from having to hold the property without developing or selling it.

“We feel that we’ve been harmed by the contamination,” he said, adding that company officials were not aware that officials suspected arson in the fire.

Tanner speculated the fire may have been caused by transients who are reported to sleep in the fenced-in building. “It has been an ongoing problem,” he said. “We know vagrants have broken into the building.”

Young declined to say what type of evidence investigators found that led them to conclude the fire was set intentionally.

Firefighters were alerted to the blaze when a gas station employee ran to the Laguna Hills fire station, located a few blocks from the fire scene, and began pounding frantically on the door, Young said. The alarm came in shortly after.

By the time firefighters arrived at the scene, Young said, the two-story building appeared fully engulfed in flames. Fire investigators said damages totaled $250,000.

It took about 60 firefighters almost two hours to control the fire. Efforts to douse the blaze were hampered because the building, abandoned for several years, had been locked and most of the entrances were boarded up, Young said.

Young said investigators had learned that a pickup truck was parked at the site about an hour before the fire was reported. He also noted there was no electricity or gas service to the building and that no one was supposed to be in the building.

Tanner said the building will be razed as soon as fire officials have completed their investigation. But the legal battles over the property will not end once the building is demolished.

Steven Overman, chief of the pollutant investigation section of the state Regional Water Quality Control Board, said the current and former owners of the gas station were told to clean up the underground fuel spill in November, 1988, but that has not happened.

He said that the cleanup effort for what he termed one of the largest underground fuel leaks in the county has been hampered by an army of environmental consultants and attorneys who are unable to decide how best to proceed.