"I thought, 'What if it spreads?'" Smith said. "Our building would have gone up just as fast."
Smith is the Past Grand Noble of the International Order of Odd Fellows, the century-old nonprofit organization of do-gooders that owns the 108-year-old building that houses the Eriksen Gallery and M. Coffee on Main Street. Like many buildings its age, Oddfellows, five years the elder of Cunha's, is made almost entirely of redwood, and doesn't have a sprinkler system.
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"At the very next Odd Fellows meeting, we began the subject of fire safety, which is something we had talked about before but that hadn't been at the top of our agenda," he said. That became a very high priority after the Cunha fire."
Two blocks away, Greg Regan, owner of the 98-year-old San Benito House, was thinking the same thing.
"The Cunha fire was a total wake-up call," he said. "Since then, we have looked around for every little thing that could potentially be a fire hazard."
According to Half Moon Bay Fire District Division Chief Gareth Harris, who serves as
the district's fire marshal,
people like Regan and Smith should take heed from the Cunha fire.
"Clearly there are other buildings that are in the same circumstance as Cunha's was and have the same potential to burn like Cunha did," he said.
Nobody was injured in the Cunha fire, Harris noted, but if a similar incident occurred at one of the historic downtown inns like the 12-room San Benito House or the Zaballa House, it could be a different story.
"The potential for loss of life is much greater if a fire like that occurred in one of the other buildings in downtown that do have sleeping rooms," he said.
Harris said he's had conversations with many of those people about the idea of installing sprinkler systems in their buildings.
"Fire sprinklers save lives," he said. "Most fires start small and spread, and sprinklers combat that problem directly."
But while Smith and Regan said fire safety is a major concern for their buildings, the cost of installing a sprinkler system - as much as $100,000 in some cases - presents a quandary.
To Regan, the idea of installing a sprinkler system in dire economic times, particularly for the tourism industry which has been even harder hit, is daunting.
"I don't see how we could possibly do it," he said. "The last two and half years have been very tough on us financially."
But while economic considerations abound, others say building owners have a duty to keep the public safe.
Local contractor Jason Fruhwirth moved to the Coastside from Southern California in 1972, and has lived and worked here ever since.
In a bizarre twist of fate, Fruhwirth had been contracted by Cunha owner Bev Ashcraft to fix the back deck of the building in May, the work that ended up being directly intertwined with the case of the fire that destroyed the building.
After some delay before starting the job, Fruhwirth was contacted by Brian Von Almen, whose wife, Tammy, used to work at Cunha's. Von Almen offered to take the Cunha's job off his hands, he said.
"That was a fortunate phone call," Fruhwirth said.
But while Fruhwirth acknowledges some fault may lie with Von Almen and Jeffrey Adams, whose work on the roof as Von Almen's subcontractor has been cited as the likely cause of the blaze, the blame for the fire can't solely reside on the shoulders of the two men.
"There is no escaping the fact that Jeff and Brian were the center cogs in this whole thing," he said. "But the fact is that if this had occurred at a place like Half Moon Bay Coffee Company, it would have probably been an isolated fire that would have required the building to be repaired."
Marina Fraser, president of the Spanishtown Historical Society, is finding a balance between preserving the historical exterior while updating the interior of the buildings to conform to the requirements of modern society.
"It is important that we keep the charm on the exterior of these buildings but definitely modernize the interior, she said.
A good example of that balance, she said, is City Hall, which was built in 1922 and looks the same on the outside as it did when it was built, but was completely retrofitted in the early 1990s.
Installation of fire sprinklers should be viewed as part of historical preservation, not incongruous with it, according to George Cresson, whose father, David Cresson, owns the 140-year-old Zaballa House on Main Street. Cresson's firm, Cresson Development, remodeled the Zaballa House in the early 1990s, and included a sprinkler system in doing so.
Including fire sprinklers in an already-planned remodel, however, is the key to the whole issue, Harris said.
Without a legal precedent for the fire district to force a building owner to install a sprinkler system and retrofit a building, a state requirement that sprinklers be included in "substantial remodels" is the pivotal issue, he said.
To Regan, an as-yet-unplanned remodel of the San Benito House will be the best time to install a sprinkler system in the building.
"If there is a time when it would be easy for us to install sprinklers, like when we'd be replacing the plumbing or something already, then we would definitely do it then," he said.
"We're never going to forget about what happened at Cunha's."
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