"I heard the whoosh, and then I heard the fire alarms come on," said Sherry Johnson, a day-care teacher at the Coastside Children's Program. In a room adjoining the church sanctuary, Johnson was overseeing about 17 napping children when a fire broke out at the back of the altar around 2:30 p.m. on June 19 at the Community United Methodist Church on Johnston Street in Half Moon Bay.
Johnson felt the door for warmth, then opened it just enough to peek into the sanctuary. She saw smoke.
 Local woodworker Bob Myers takes down a burned cross from the wall at Community United Methodist Church in Half Moon Bay the morning of June 20. Myers said he built the cross using redwood from the old chapel and he's not sure it can be salvaged. |
The Half Moon Bay Fire District's acting fire marshal, Clayton Jolley, said that the fire was fizzling when fire crews arrived on the scene. When firefighters entered the sanctuary, they saw two sprinklers dousing a smoldering wood cross that was hanging on a wall at the back of the altar. An eight-foot wood table with two candles on it sat beneath the cross.
"Preliminarily, it looks like it was the consequence of some candles that were lit," Jolley said.
Gayle Dee, the church's ministry assistant, and office manager Dorothy Baughman said that no services had been held in the church prior to the fire.
Jolley said that it took him no more than three to five minutes to turn off the sprinklers, which he estimated had released as much as 600 gallons of water.
Meanwhile, across the street, Ken Ormonde had returned home from an afternoon walk to find more than a dozen children sitting in front of his house. He opened his garage door and let the children and teachers get some shelter on the cold day.
"The only thing I could think about was getting them out of the cold wind," he said. "The kids were well-behaved, sitting in a circle. The teacher kept reading to them." Parents were called, and within the next couple of hours all of the children were picked up.
Walking through the sanctuary the next day, Jack King, co-president of the church's board of trustees, said that the sanctuary was filled with "this much" water, indicating a space of an inch and a half with his thumb and index finger. Dozens of humidifiers and blowers had removed most of the water, but the carpet was still damp. Cleaning crews had elevated all the pews off the carpet by placing them on hundreds of white Styrofoam squares.
The table, which had been beneath the cross, had been moved from the wall to the center of the altar and covered with plastic. The cross was gone, and a white outline of it stood out against a large black burn mark on the wall.
King said that the primary damage to the sanctuary was due to water, and that smoke had probably ruined two large speakers on either side of the altar. But both kinds of damages are preferable to what could have happened had the sprinklers and the firefighters not been so prompt.
"We're very happy with the job the fire department did," King said.
By the end of the week, insurance inspectors had told King that the sanctuary would require at least two months' work in order to repair everything properly. King said work was needed on the sanctuary's ventilation, plus some painting, new carpeting and woodwork.
In an unrelated incident, firefighters responded to the church again three days later.
In the course of conducting restoration work in the sanctuary after the first fire, maintenance staff tripped a fire alarm. Children once again woke from their naps and trooped across the street in sock feet to sit in front of the Ormondes' home. Because this one was a false alarm, the children went back to school instead of home with parents.
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