The Theta Chi Fraternity house, located on the corner of Upham and Chorro Streets, caught fire around noon today. The two men home at the time were not hurt.
The San Luis Obispo Fire Department responded to the fire around 12:45 p.m. The fire, which took about an hour to extinguish, destroyed the front left side of the house, burning two of the five bedrooms and the Theta Chi letters posted above the front door.
At 3 p.m., fraternity members were waiting to enter the house to see the interior damages.
Electrical engineering grad student Clint Hebrew said he was in the kitchen when he heard the smoke detector go off.
“I turned the corner and the whole porch was on fire,” he said.
Soon after he and materials engineering junior Blake Gaspar got out of the house, the police and Theta Chi president, materials engineering junior Kyle Reilly, arrived.
Hebrew said he only managed to grab clothes, his soaked laptop and a tool set from the house before the fire department arrived. He had planned to move out of the house in a few weeks; he said his first thought after seeing the flames was, “Why now?”
Mechanical engineering junior Ryan Fontanesi said the brothers learned about the fire via their Twitter page.
“We have a Twitter that we send messages through. I got a text in class around 1 p.m. with a Twitpic. If there hadn’t been a picture, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Fontanesi said. When we got there, there were seven firetrucks and flames coming from my room.”
Reilly said he heard about the fire while on his way back from class at Cal Poly.
“At first I didn’t believe it, ” he said. “It’s kind of unreal when you see your house on fire.”
Only two of the bedrooms were badly damaged by the fire; two others sustained water damage from efforts to put out the flames. There are five bedrooms in the house.
“I’m assuming most of my stuff is wrecked; it was just stuff,” Reilly said. He added he was happy that none of the six residents were hurt and that he had his laptop with him in class.
San Luis Obispo Fire Department Battalion Chief Chris Slate said the fire looked accidental. He said 40 percent of the house was damaged. The fire took longer than normal because it had spread to the attic. Slate said because the house is old (approximately 100 years), there are no fire stops in the walls to keep fire from spreading.
Sandy Ray has lived in the house next door for 24 years. Ray said she came home from work and was about to fall asleep on the couch when a big noise woke her up. She later learned the noise was the explosion of a can of paint thinner, which the fire department has said might have caused the fire.
Ray said when she went into the yard to see the fire, the smell and the heat were overwhelming.
“Absolutely, it was horrible. Enough for my eye makeup to tear up,” she said.
Because of the fraternity house’s age and how fast the fire spread, she first worried the fire would spread to her roof. She called her husband and asked the firemen twice to see if they should douse her roof with water, but because it wasn’t windy, her home wasn’t in danger of catching on fire.
Theta Chi took over the house from Kappa Chi Fraternity this summer and had begun renovating it. They put in new floors throughout the house and had replaced the shingles on the front. The next improvement would have been to replace the roof. Hebrew estimated the renovations cost between $30,000 and $50,000.
There are 62 members of the fraternity; the residents have already received offers to stay with other brothers.
“There’s definitely couches I can crash on,” Reilly said. “After that you deal with it, it’s life.”