Burnt Home Becoming Neighborhood Health Hazard
INDIO — Residents of Towne Street say a burned down home has become a hazardous playground for children. Five months after the fire, neighbors want to know when the city will tear this house down. News Channel 3 gets answers.
Firefighters tried, but couldn’t save much in this Indio house fire. Nobody was injured when this home on Towne Street burned down in May. But the neighborhood was harmed in other ways.
“It’s kind of dangerous for the kids to come out because they walk down the street. You know it’s curiosity for them,” says one neighbor preferring not to give her name. When asked what she would see at the house, the woman adds, “A lot of hobos. They go in there and sleep. A lot of people go by, and steal the steel. Kids go up to the house and wonder what happened. I think it’s just dangerous.”
Jorge Flores tells us in Spanish the dangers this home poses to the neighborhood, “Yes, it’s very bad, what’s over there. The city should worry about it. Should get it cleaned. It’s a danger for the kids. There’s delinquents there. It looks bad.”
The neighbors keep wondering, when will the city of Indio tear this home down? We went to code enforcement to get answers.
“Hopefully, within the next couple of weeks, within the next 10 working days or so, hopefully, we’ll get the court order so our code enforcement can go to the property and proceed to demolish the property since the owners were not able to,” answers Indio Police spokesman Ben Guitron.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because we profiled another burnt Indio home in October. Two years after that fire, neighbors still fear the collapse of the home’s walls.
Because there is still so much debris and ash left over from this more recent Towne Street home fire, neighbors get to breathe it in every time winds pick up.
Neighbor Art Luna adds, “Maybe it’s an accident just waiting to happen again. There is a lot of debris in there and that can’t be good.
Even though these homes can pose a health hazard to the neighborhood, the city says there are many hurdles to tear it down. The number one problem, they say, are the banks that own the title on these homes are often hard to contact these days.
