Apples on Fire

The big story down here in Watsonville last week was a 4-alarm fire at the Apple Growers Ice and Cold Storage Co. warehouse in Watsonville that completely destroyed the building and most of its contents. It started at 3:30 on Wednesday and burned for almost 2 full days. Once they deemed that no one was inside the building, firefighters stayed safely outside and worked mainly to contain the blaze as it burned itself out.

Concern about ammonia tanks on site led the fire department to send out reverse 911 calls to residents within 3 miles with instructions to shelter inside. (The official word is that no ammonia leaks were in fact detected from the fire. That thick black smoke couldn’t have been good though.) We got one of those calls Wednesday night, though fortunately for us the smoke was blowing in the opposite direction. In fact, we got very little smoke here the entire two days. But that didn’t stop the children from wanting to bring our 10 chickens inside for the night. We nixed that idea, but not without major grumbling and charged philosophical discussions—“Why do you care about people more than chickens?” I did promise to bring them in if we thought they were in immediate danger, though where we would have put them I’m glad I didn’t have to figure out.

The small out-building that we currently use as an employee break room and which served as the original milk cooler from the days when our farm was a dairy, was built around the same time (late twenties) as the Apple Growers facility. When we removed the cooler—which was essentially a room within a room– we found redwood framed walls tightly packed with shredded redwood bark to serve as insulation. It was this shredded redwood within the partitioning walls of the Apple Growers shed that caused the fire to smolder on for so long. The facility contained 6,000 bins of apples and millions of dollars worth of Martinelli’s bottled juice. The organic debris that was washed into Watsonville Sough behind the warehouse from the fire hoses trying to douse the flames also apparently caused a die-off of hundreds of catfish, carp and sunfish in the slough. In addition to the immediate tragedy of these losses, it’s a blow to Watsonville to lose this historic building that has been a part of the local economy for over 80 years.

Fire Photos by Tarmo Hannula of the Register Pajaronian