For years, the people living in old tents and decrepit RVs on the edges of San Jose’s Columbus Park have been fending off city officials trying to kick them out of their makeshift homes.
On Sunday afternoon, they tried to fight off a wildfire.
With black smoke filling the air, seven of the park’s 200 or so residents grabbed their shovels, rakes, pickaxes and garden hoes and rushed toward the flames whipping across the open field that stretches three city blocks. Like professional first responders, they started digging a fire line to contain the flames.
“Some of us can’t hold a job and pay rent, some of us have bad habits,” said Jimmy Cruz, 43, one of the men with a shovel. “But this is my community.”
Fires break out at this homeless encampment all the time — three have sparked over the past week alone. It’s been a problem throughout the region — in Oakland, one encampment fire closed a Highway 24 onramp in April 2023 and another erupted under Interstate 880 in March 2022. Each time there’s a blaze at San Jose’s Columbus Park, a ragtag brigade of people here band together to fight it.
Some of them even know what they’re doing: Eugene Blackwell, who served time in a Colorado prison for robbery in the early 2000s, battled wildfires as part of an inmate firefighting crew. Over the past six years he’s lived in his white car parked on Asbury Street, he’s been training his neighbors. He figures they’ve put out as many as 30 fires, mostly small ones started by campfires and discarded cigarettes.
Sunday’s wildfire was by far the biggest, growing to 20 acres and coming within about 20 yards of the sprawling encampment.
Sunday, Blackwell led the charge.
When San Jose Fire Battalion Chief Brett Maas arrived, he saw the group digging the fire break, some of them shirtless and in shorts.
“With a fast-moving fire and light, flashy fuels, they put themselves in danger,” he said.
It’s a risk this group was willing to take to save the place they call home.
“I don’t have a family, so the ones we have out here are close. We cook. We have dinners,” Cruz said. “We put our money together and we help each other out.”
For years, city officials have tried to remove Columbus Park’s residents, who live under the flight path next to the airport. But they keep moving back.
Last month, the San Jose City Council voted to restore the open field as a public park and convert it to soccer fields, horseshoe pits and basketball courts.
Resolving the homeless crisis is a top priority for San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, who has promised 1,400 new beds by the end of the year, along with dramatically increased access to drug and mental health treatment.
“I’m out in our encampments just about every week, and I meet incredibly resourceful people who are trying to survive,” Mahan said in an interview Tuesday. But Sunday’s fire, he said, “underscores how important it is that we tackle this crisis of unsheltered homelessness head on, and hold every city and every county accountable for building safe, dignified places for people to be — to help people get out of these very dangerous conditions.”
On Monday morning, after the smoke had cleared, city flyers were tacked up on fences giving notice that the encampment would be cleared starting in late July. Mahan acknowledged there aren’t enough rooms to house all of them yet — and some will likely move along to another encampment.
“It’s a terrible situation,” Mahan said, noting that Columbus Park has been the scene of 400 emergency calls over recent years, including stabbings and human trafficking. “We have children out there. Dispersing the encampment and actually trying to move people indoors and cleaning up all of the accumulated debris and reducing the fire risk becomes a necessity for public safety and public health. We don’t like the situation … but we can’t leave it as it is, either.”
When Blackwell was paroled from prison, he thought his firefighting days were over. Firefighters had died on Colorado’s Hayman fire in 2002, he said, and he decided “it’s not worth my life.”
“But the training is still in my head,” he said, “and I still have to use it every day out here.”
Shortly after 2 p.m. Sunday, Blackwell learned of the fire when his sister pounded on the door of his truck. When he looked outside, “this whole area right here was just black. I couldn’t see anything.”
He normally relied on the women he had trained to help put out small fires — they were always at the ready, he said. But this fire already looked too big and dangerous, and the women turned to rescuing the pets. Katherine Davis, the unofficial mayor of the encampment who was handy with a shovel, was yelling at some extra men to join Blackwell.
Blackwell and a friend named David started close to a grove of old trees they wanted to save, but the fire was coming too fast.
“I always run and try to stop it because there’s too much to lose here,” said David, 63, who declined to give his last name, “especially nowadays that they’re making that decision to kick us out of here. We have to do whatever we can.”
But several propane tanks were exploding, he said, and he and Blackwell retreated closer to the encampment, where they met up with Cruz, who was digging a line with four others.
Blackwell directed them to scrape off the layer of dead brown grasses that had recently been cut by city crews to reach bare dirt. If they scraped it wide enough — maybe two feet for these fast-moving but low flames — the fire would stop right there without any fuel. That could keep their line of RVs parked on Asbury safe, along with the rest parked along Spring Street toward Taylor Street.
For Blackwell, he had another reason to keep scraping. His truck held his late mother’s China hutch, built by his grandfather.
“It’s been in our family over 100 years,” he said. “It means a lot to me.”
Blackwell’s asthma got the best of him after about 10 minutes, and he needed to take a short break before he returned to the line. But by then, San Jose Police officers were telling the volunteers to back off. The fire department that had started fighting the fire on the other side of the field would take care of it, the officers said.
“We’re not stopping until we see them put water on it,” Blackwell said.
So they kept digging until the fire stretched about 50 yards.
Within minutes, they saw the cascades of water shooting from the fire hoses, dousing the flames that had not quite reached their fire break. But it was there, holding, just in case.
Their faces dripping with sweat, they laid down their shovels and rakes, pickaxes and garden hoes.
Their Columbus Park community was intact.
For now.