Two boats burn at Huntington Harbour dock; one sinks and spills an estimated 450 gallons of fuel
Fire crews answered a call shortly after 1 p.m. Wednesday at a residential dock in the 16000 block of Ardsley Circle. Neither boat was occupied, and no injuries were reported.
Two boats tied to one another caught fire Wednesday afternoon at a residential dock in Huntington Harbour, and one of the vessels, a 40-foot boat, later sank, spilling an estimated 450 gallons of fuel into the water.
Huntington Beach Fire Department Capt. Steve Teasdale said the call came in shortly after 1 p.m. from someone in the 16000 block of Ardsley Circle reporting a blaze at a nearby residential dock. Firefighters, he said, 'arrived to find both boats involved in fire and quickly worked to bring the fire under control.'
Crews extinguished the flames with a boat-mounted water cannon from the Orange County Sheriff's Department's Harbor Patrol Division and with hose lines from different vantage points on the ground. Neither boat was occupied at the time of the incident, and no injuries were reported.
Personnel from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife's Office of Spill Prevention and Response and the U.S. Coast Guard responded to the harbor, where they found the 40-foot sunken vessel and a diesel sheen on the water, state officials said. The Fire Department's hazardous materials team placed absorbent booms in the water as a precaution to capture spilled fuel and other runoff, and firefighters later conducted a cleanup operation.
The fire is the second boat fire at the harbor in one week. On Sept. 23, a 33-foot express cruiser named 'Nautical Nonsense,' tied to a residential slip, became engulfed in flames. The causes of both fires remain under investigation, and damage to Wednesday's two boats was significant enough to obscure the vessels' names.
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