Charge: Teacher started Lick fire
It seemed harmless enough: burning a pile of paper plates inside a metal drum. And so Margaret Pavese stepped back inside her rural cabin, prosecutors said, not realizing she had unwittingly sparked what would become one of the biggest wildfires in the history of Santa Clara County.
Wednesday, prosecutors said the 50-year-old San Juan Bautista schoolteacher had been formally charged in the blaze and detailed for the first time how the tiny flames on her hillside property sprawled into a 47,760-acre wildfire that raged out of control for more than a week.
Three hours after she lit the fire, prosecutors said, she heard what sounded like running water and rushed outside, only to find the flames leaping from the barrel. She sprayed them with a garden hose, but to no avail. Without a phone and unable to find her car keys to get help, she grabbed the closest thing she could - a shotgun.
She fired three rounds into the air, hoping to alert her husband who was out chopping firewood, prosecutors said. Hearing the blasts, he returned to help her, picking up a garden hose of his own, but by then the blaze had already grown too big.
"I don't think anyone was going to fight this fire with a garden hose," said Frank Carrubba, Santa Clara County supervising deputy district attorney.
The blaze, which whipped through the steep canyons and rugged ridgelines of South County before moving into Henry W. Coe State Park, eventually cost the state $13 million to battle.
It's a price that Pavese may have to help bear if she is found to be responsible for starting the fire. A judge ultimately would decide how much she would pay, based on her income. "She may have to pay the Department of Revenue for the rest of her life," Carrubba said. Pavese, charged Tuesday with a misdemeanor count of failing to exercise reasonable care in the disposal of flammable materials to prevent causing an uncontrolled fire, also faces six months in jail and a $1,000 fine. She did not return calls Wednesday. Carrubba said Pavese wet the area around the corroded, 55-gallon metal burn barrel, then loaded the paper plates inside it about 10:30 a.m. on Labor Day. She covered it with a piece of corrugated roofing and placed a rock on top, he said, then went inside her cabin. Flames soon ignited grass that had been growing inside the barrel, Carrubba said, and the fire escaped and advanced up the hill into the heavy, thick terrain away from the cabin, at the end of Blue Ridge Road north of Henry W. Coe State Park. Within hours, Pavese told Cal Fire investigators what had happened. Carrubba said Pavese had failed to take proper care in several ways: Although she wet the area surrounding the barrel, she failed to clear it of any flammable liquid or vegetation, he said. She also used corrugated roofing instead of the required quarter-inch mesh to cover the barrel. And she didn't have a burn permit, he said. All such permits had been suspended in July because of dry conditions in the summer. At one point, more than 1,800 firefighters were battling the Lick fire, named for its proximity to the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton. Nearly all of the fire was within the 88,000-acre Henry W. Coe State Park, an expansive landscape of oak woodlands and steep, dry chaparral. Although the fire scorched thousands of acres, Assistant District Attorney David Howe said Pavese won't face felony arson charges because she did not intend to start the wildfire. "She was and is extremely distraught over this," Carrubba said.
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