Fire Guts Oxnard Hangar, Melts 12 Planes : Blaze: Explosions rock neighborhood, rousting residents from nearby apartments. Oil-soaked rags are suspected as cause.

Fire swept through a hangar at the Oxnard Airport early Friday, melting a dozen planes and setting off a succession of fireballs that rocked the neighborhood and turned the pre-dawn sky bright red.

The 4:24 a.m. blaze, which gutted the 32,000-square-foot hangar, caused an estimated $3.5 million in damage.

“It’s flat, completely gone,” Oxnard Fire Department spokesman Bill Scobey said of the metal hangar that lay crumpled and smoldering hours after the fire was extinguished.

Although the cause of the fire was not immediately known, inspectors said Friday afternoon that they suspect a pile of oil-soaked rags may have spontaneously caught fire and ignited the blaze. But inspectors said the rags are only one of many possible sources and that it could take days or even weeks to determine the cause.

Planes, including two early morning commercial flights, took off and landed at the airport Friday without interruption.

The hangar is owned by Ventura County and leased to Venco Pacific Aviation, which rented space to private plane owners and ran a maintenance and aviation operation. A computer consultant and an accountant also had offices in the hangar. Venco owner Jim Schoenneman of Agoura Hills could not be reached for comment Friday.

As firefighters battled the blaze, soot and charred metal rained on an apartment complex across the street from the airport.

Apartment residents, crowded in a nearby parking lot and cloaked in blankets to fend off the morning cold, said they feared that the wood-shingle roofs on their units would catch fire.

“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” said Connie Williams, who said she and her children were awakened by a series of explosions. “All this stuff was flying through the air. The whole sky was filled with sparks.”

As explosions ripped through the hangar, panicked residents went door to door waking their neighbors. Some fled their homes in nightgowns and pajamas.

Williams’ 18-year-old son, Joe, said there were about a dozen explosions--caused by gas tanks and other fuel sources--over half an hour.

“I saw big fireballs in the sky,” he said. “The sky was totally red.”

The fire was so intense that it melted everything in the hangar, including the 12 planes, into an unrecognizable mass of metal. One plane, a turboprop Mitsubishi, was valued at $700,000, officials said.

Scobey said 61 firefighters from the Oxnard and Ventura County fire departments took about 1 1/2 hours to put out the blaze.