Disaster Averted in Hixson ’03 Blaze

The memory came back sharply, like a burst of smoke.

An early morning explosion at Hixson Metal Finishing Co. Reports of smoke and a growing fire. Tom Arnold, already awake from fighting an earlier blaze, sighed and said, “Oh, no. Not again.”

The chemical fire, reported at the company’s Newport Beach building at 4:32 a.m. Tuesday and contained within 40 minutes, left no injuries and just $50,000 in damages. But it struck the same place charred by a much larger fire in February 1987 -- one that caused chemical spills that took a week to clean up.

Three firefighters who helped quell that earlier fire, which was ignited by a ruptured vat of acid, contracted cancer. However, doctors could never establish whether their cancers resulted from exposure to the 140 chemicals involved. One of the men is alive; the others didn’t make it to age 50.

Tuesday’s fire -- also caused by an acid vat that burst -- singed the building’s ventilation equipment and then the roof, officials said. Four employees tried to douse the flames with hand-held extinguishers. They then called 911 and fled.

Arnold, a deputy fire chief who remembers the previous fire, said firefighters have learned a lot in 16 years about handling such incidents.

This time, chemical runoff was better contained. Less water was used, and sand was piled on puddles. Police officers were shooed away from the “hot zone,” an area within a radius of 100 feet of the building.

The 33 responding firefighters from Newport Beach and Costa Mesa also were better trained for handling a chemical blaze. Since the 1987 fire, the state has begun requiring hazardous-materials classes, plus eight hours of refresher courses each year.

And the county Hazardous Material Team, trained for such spills and leaks, “is basically a lab on wheels,” said county Fire Authority Capt. Stephen Miller.

After Tuesday’s fire was extinguished, 20 firefighters were decontaminated at the scene and at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian.

All were released by noon, according to Donna Boston, a Newport Beach Fire Department spokeswoman.

Nearby business filled up by 8:30 a.m. Hixson reopened, too. Arnold took a nap after briefing other officials, relieved that the Hixson sequel didn’t resemble the original.

“There are certain fires in your career you don’t forget,” he said. “Let me tell you, I remembered. We didn’t let our guard down.”