Behind a pair of apartment buildings, a line of garages and vehicles lies in a nearly unrecognizable pile of burnt rubble. Soot covers the wall of a building behind the garages and reaches to the second floor of one of the quadplexes. One apartment unit is now boarded up.
Long Beach firefighters this week responded to two fires just over 24 hours apart at this apartment complex on Stanley Avenue near Anaheim Street, but it wasn’t the first time they had to rush to the building recently, according to officials.
LBFD spokesman Capt. Jack Crabtree said the address has seen four fires in the last three months.
In one of the latest blazes this week, a fire raged through a line of about a dozen single-car garages around 8:30 Wednesday night. It exploded several vehicles before firefighters put it out, Crabtree said.
And just after midnight on Friday, another fire started in a trash can before traveling into a downstairs apartment unit, fire officials said. In the morning, that unit was boarded up. The resident inside was able to get out safely before firefighters got there, officials said.
Brian Carlon, a resident, remembers the first two fires as comparatively small: They were both in the garages, but the structure was still left standing. They started two weeks apart, but both times he and his wife were able to get their vehicles out of the garages before they were damaged because the fires were on the opposite end of the driveway.
They weren’t so lucky this week: Carlon’s truck is totaled, with the driver’s side burnt, paint bubbled and side mirror melted. His wife was able to get her car out in time, he said, but he suffered minor burns on his forearm trying to save his truck. He said the fire started in an open garage near his own.
He recalled Friday night’s fire, which blazed in front of and inside the unit below his own second-floor apartment.
“We heard somebody screaming out, ‘Fire! Fire!'” Carlon said. “As soon as I opened the door the flames were right here, so I closed it, grabbed my kids and left out the front.”
He doesn’t know how the fires started, as most of them sparked when he was asleep or in bed, but he noted his downstairs neighbor had several tables in his front door alcove, not a trash can.
Investigators are still working to determine the causes of all of the blazes and won’t release any new information until their investigation is complete, but Carlon said firefighters told him at least the latest blaze was likely intentionally set.
“I don’t know, somebody’s obviously targeting somebody,” Carlon said.
After months of this, he and his family are moving before someone is seriously injured.
“It still smells like smoke,” he said. “I have two kids. … They’re scared.”
The other two units in his building are already empty. His downstairs neighbor lost three cars in this week’s garage fire. In the quadplex next door that shares the driveway, one family is packing up, too, with boxes piled on the patio.
The family couldn’t talk at length about it, but when asked if they were moving because of the fires, the man inside simply nodded his head and said, “Oh, yes.”
