Two more boats up in flames in Huntington Harbour, one week after earlier fire

Huntington Beach Fire Department Capt. Steve Teasdale said the incident occurred shortly after 1 p.m., when an individual in the 16000 block of Ardsley Circle called to report a blaze at a nearby residential dock.

“Firefighters arrived to find both boats involved in fire and quickly worked to bring the fire under control,” he said, adding that the response was aided by a water-carrying vessel from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department’s Harbor Patrol Division, which regularly monitors the harbor.

Two vessels burned Wednesday in Huntington Harbour, exactly one week after an earlier incident nearby. (Huntington Beach Fire Department) Crews made short work of extinguishing the blazes, using the boat-mounted water cannon as well as multiple hose lines from different vantage points on the ground. Neither boat was occupied at the time of the incident, and no injuries were reported, according to Teasdale.

The origin point and cause of the fire is being investigated. After the flames had been doused, HBFD’s Hazardous Materials team placed absorbent booms in the water as a precaution to capture any potentially spilled fuel, fluids or other possibly harmful runoff from the damaged vessels.

Wednesday’s fire is just a short distance away from another boat fire called in shortly before 1 p.m. on Sept. 23. In that incident, a 33-foot express cruiser called “Nautical Nonsense,” also tied to a residential slip, became engulfed in flames. The cause of that incident is still under investigation, Teasdale said.

Damage on the two boats tied together Wednesday was significant enough to obscure the names of the vessels and no information about the presence of the crafts owner or owners was immediately available.

Two boats tied up at a residential dock near the 16000 block of Ardsley Circle in Huntington Harbour caught fire Wednesday. (Huntington Beach Fire Department) NewsHuntington Beach Get our free TimesOC newsletter, sent twice a week, for the news that matters to your community.

Sara Cardine covers the city of Costa Mesa for the Daily Pilot. She came from the La Cañada Valley Sun, where she spent six years as the news reporter covering La Cañada Flintridge and received a first-place Public Service Journalism award from the California News Publishers Assn. She’s also worked at the Pasadena Weekly, Stockton Record and Lodi-News Sentinel, which instilled in her a love for community news. (714) 966-4627