KUSI.com - KUSI News - San Diego CA - News, Weather, PPRBomb Factory' House Leveled by Controlled Fire

ESCONDIDO (CNS) - A North County home packed with illegal explosives and weapons was demolished today in a spectacular controlled burn deemed the only reasonably safe way to dispose of the volatile chemicals.

A bomb squad remotely ignited the home in the 1900 block of Via Scott in unincorporated Escondido just before 11 a.m. Heavy smoke soon was pouring out of the roof of the dwelling, followed by intense flames several stories high.

A few minutes later, the entire house was furiously burning, along with a few nearby patches of shrubbery, and loud popping noises and occasional blasts reverberated through the largely vacated neighborhood just west of Interstate 15 and north of State Route 78.

Within 45 minutes, the inferno had dwindled to campfire-sized flames licking a scorched pile of rubble as emergency personnel and area residents breathed long-awaited sighs of relief.

San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore praised the unusual and complex demolition as an unqualified success.

"I don't think this could have gone any better," Gore told reporters. Dozens of air-quality sensors set up through the neighborhood detected brief spikes in pollution, followed by safe conditions, officials said.

The various pops and bangs that rang out during the blaze were apparently the sounds of detonating ammunition and hand grenades that were among the illegal stockpile of weapons and bomb-making materials discovered in and around the home three weeks ago, sheriff's spokeswoman Jan Caldwell said.

George Djura Jakubec, 54, who lived in the house with his wife for about four years, pleaded not guilty Monday to eight federal criminal counts and was ordered held without bail.

The Serbian native is accused of manufacturing and possessing destructive devices, as well as robbing three banks and trying to rob a fourth over the past two years. Authorities have disclosed no motive for the defendant's alleged bomb-making activities.

Though the charred rubble and ashes of the incinerated structure were expected to smolder through the night, residents of about six dozen surrounding evacuated addresses were able to return to their homes in the mid-afternoon.

Interstate 15, which was closed between SR-78 and Centre City Parkway about an hour prior to the fire, was fully reopened shortly after noon.

On Friday, crews will retrieve pieces of the charred rubble to test for remaining explosive chemicals and other hazardous substances, though it was considered "highly unlikely that there's any (remaining) toxicity," Caldwell told news crews.

Nonetheless, authorities refrained from spraying water on the embers of the destroyed house so as to avoid washing contaminants into storm drains or surrounding soil, according to Gore.

"We're hoping the fire will just put itself out," the sheriff said.

The controlled burn resulted in temperatures of 1,500 to 1,800 degrees inside the condemned house, enough heat enough to neutralize all the dangerous chemicals stashed and strewn throughout, said San Marcos Fire Chief Todd Newman, one of the supervisors of the operation.

County Public Health Officer Wilma Wooten said it was unlikely that anyone would suffer any significant ill effects from toxins released by the controlled burn.

"In general, the ash from a normal house fire does not build up in areas outside the immediate vicinity the way it might during a wildfire," she said. "It is possible (occupants of) homes very close to the burn site may smell smoke. While it is unlikely that neighbors will experience any symptoms, smoke can cause eye and throat irritation, coughing and difficulty breathing."

Wooten advised area residents -- particularly senior citizens, pregnant women, families with young children and people with chronic lung disease such as asthma or heart ailments -- to keep their windows and doors closed overnight and to avoid using fans that might pull smoky air inside.

Thorough cleanup efforts at the site are expected to begin next week.

The controlled fire was originally scheduled to begin about 9 a.m. but was postponed to allow an atmospheric "inversion layer" to break up so the resulting smoke would billow straight up in the air before dissipating, said Robert Kard, director of the San Diego County Air Pollution Control District.

That best-case scenario played out, with the black plume rising some 2,500 feet before drifting away to the east, the sheriff said.

After the blaze began raging, Michael Martinez, who lives across I-15 from the burn site, said he was "not too worried" about his own home, though the column of smoke seemed to be headed toward it.

"I'm more worried about storage lockers nearby -- that (Jakubec) might not have stored all his explosives in one place," Martinez said. "I hope investigators look into that."

The hoard of hazardous compounds -- including substances often used by suicide bombers and other terrorists -- was "the largest quantity of these types of homemade explosives (ever found) at one place in the United States," Deputy District Attorney Terri Perez said at Jakubec's initial court appearance in the case.

Perez told a judge the defendant had turned his home into a "bomb factory."

Jakubec's alleged activities came to light Nov. 18, when a landscaper, 49-year-old Mario Garcia of Fallbrook, stepped on and detonated some type of explosive in Jakubec's back yard, suffering serious injuries.

The defendant allegedly admitted to robbing three banks as well as keeping explosives and other weapons at his home.

Investigators found at least nine pounds of unstable explosive compounds in the unkempt house, which was littered throughout with piles of boxes, books, tools, plastic bottles, electronic components and other clutter. Much of the illicit chemical cache was in glass jars, and some apparently had spilled on the floor, officials said.

At a hearing on Wednesday, FBI special agent and bomb technician James Verdi testified that explosives were found in the home in "amounts we've never seen before" -- either domestically or internationally.

A coffee table was covered with improvised detonators and chemical compounds so sensitive that even papers on it couldn't be moved, Verdi told a judge.

Federal prosecutor Rees Morgan said there was evidence of other past unintended explosions at the residence, such as blown-out windows and walls and ceilings bowed outward and upward.

The owner of the rental property reportedly will not be reimbursed by the government, although it was unclear if the loss of the house might be covered by insurance.

The discovery of the stockpile of explosives prompted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare the San Diego region a disaster area. On Tuesday, the county Board of Supervisors ratified a local emergency declaration that allowed authorities to torch the home.

In addition to evacuations and road closures, preparations for the burn included erecting a 16-foot-high metal-framed barrier, removing vegetation and fences that could have caught fire, and installing a portable weather station on the roof of nearby Escondido Fire Department Fire Station 3 to get real-time readings.

The intricately planned operation may well wind up serving as a teaching tool for dealing with similarly acute hazardous-materials problems in the future, the sheriff said.

"If an incident like this ever happens again in the United States, this is the example they'll look to," Gore told reporters during an afternoon briefing. "This is the textbook for how to do it. Something on this scale hasn't been done before."