SAN ANTONIO — When thick, black smoke started pouring from a 90-year-old home in the 400 block of Seguin Avenue just after 1 p.m., San Antonio firefighters had no trouble making their way to the scene of the fast-moving fire.
The incident commander and all the neighbors said this is the third fire to spark at the abandoned home in the last few weeks.
In spite of the fact that the home has been repeatedly boarded up, one man who used to live in the house said trespassers just can't be stopped.
"They said there was squatters staying there," Richard Garcia said.
Garcia said he grew up in the modest wood-framed structure where his family lived for more than 60 years. As of Monday evening, city crews demolished it.
"Eight of us was born there," Garcia said of the home, which apparently had a number of additions over the years. "To see it go like this is not fair. This is not right."
"Apparently this has been the third fire that's been called in to this residence in the last six to eight weeks," added Matt Hartl, incident commander with the San Antoni Fire Department (SAFD).
Hartl confirmed previous fires had been reported on July 21 and Sept. 26. But the investigation continues into what caused the Monday flames.
"There was no current utility service that anyone was paying for, but obviously they had electricity in the front that they didn't have a meter for and essentially those wires were catching fire immediately when we got here," Hartl said.
Hartl said the fire had quite a head start before their arrival.
"When the crews got here there was heavy fire on the front side and heavy fire on the back side, so it's kind of hard to determine where the fire really started in the structure."
Hartl said that, given the close proximity to adjoining structures, it's fortunate there were no other structures involved and no known injuries.
John, a neighbor who has a business next door, said he worries about the family that lives in a house just 30 feet away.
"The house next door has a family with small children who lives there. We operate a business on the other side. Luckily, we had someone who saw this and called it in or it looks like it would have been much worse," John said.
John said when the home burned in September, he hoped the city would move to demolish it then.
"The next day the city sent out a crew to mitigate the damage. They boarded up the house and removed some belongings but that was the last of any effort by the city," he said.
The city has a dangerous structures ordinance that details the process for how buildings are declared unsafe. The Building Standards Board can order a structure to be repaired or demolished at the owner's expense.
More information about how the code enforcement process works can be found here.