Firefighters quickly douse Atherton blaze

Interestingly the fire caused a Comcast outage in Atherton between the tracks and El Camino and in the Park Forest section of MP - the outage lasted until about 9:45am.

Living about a block away, my window suddenly rattled at 6:34. I thought it was a minor quake, but nothing was swinging. Guess that's when the tank blew.

Anyone driving by this house can readily see that the resident(s) have accumulated a lot of "possessions" (read: junk) in their front yard, so I suppose it's no surprise that they did in their backyard as well. Still, how does one qualify an "accidental" explosion from propane/butane? And at 6:30 AM?? Do those things spontaneously combust?! I'm really glad that no one was hurt, but this should be a wake-up call to the occupant(s) to get their act together and clean up the excess wood and storage areas, etc., erected in their yard over the past year or so. Talk about adding fuel to a fire! (literally). We're not very far away, so I can tell you that the explosion was pretty frightening (loud). Lying in bed, it sounded like a small meteor landing nearby. Within minutes of the explosion, the height of the fire was 25+ feet (as it climbed nearby trees). I felt the harm done could've been a lot worse (i.e., with all the neighboring dense trees, etc.). Fortunately, the police and fire departments had excellent response times in containing the fire, so kudos to them for doing a fine job.

I was out early for a donut run driving south on El Camino when I noticed the dark plume of smoke rising up into the sky. The firemen pulled out of the station right in front of me and I wondered if I would ever find out where the fire was. When I grew up we had a home town radio station and you could turn it on and find out the local news shortly after it happened.

Well, it was a nice surprise when only an hour or so later, I happened to look at my Almanac online and there was the information about the location of the fire.

Reminds me of the old days back in a small town in New York State. Thanks.

All fire dispatch calls are immediately posted on this web site - at the same time that the message is sent to the responding fire house:

Web Link

The Menlo Park Fire Protection District is the epitomy of what a Fire Protection District should be! Keep up the good work!