PHOTOS: It’s not every day that a major building in San Jose becomes consumed by a raging inferno, sending up dark clouds of smoke that can be seen for miles, forcing hundreds of people to flee for safety and captivating the nation’s attention.
So when a Home Depot store in South San Jose quickly burst aflame last weekend, many residents were reminded of one of the city’s last calamitous structure fires: the 2002 Santana Row blaze.
While San Jose has experienced a multitude of other massive infernos in the past two decades — including a 2010 blaze that burned most of Merritt Trace Elementary School to the ground and a 2014 five-alarm fire that destroyed a 120,000-square-foot warehouse — Santana Row remains the worst in San Jose history, ingrained in the minds of many residents.
In some ways — from the building types to the size and breadth of destruction — the Santana Row and Home Depot fires are quite different. But stories told by residents feature sobering similarities.