A city on fire

UNLIKE typhoons, fires leave almost nothing but burned structures and ashes. This was the experience of Davao City’s central business district underwent when a huge fire nearly wiped out its commercial center on Feb. 10, 1964. Although no death was recorded and the incident traced to faulty electrical wiring, the blaze, which started at Davao Superette along Anda Street, near the junction of Rizal Street, was one of the biggest calamities to hit the city in post-war years.
The morning flames ate up Lyric Theater, Universal Theater, and Liberty Barber Shop, and later all the stores along Anda and San Pedro streets, including the Vera Cruz Hotel. Miraculously spared were the houses of the Magallanes, Monfort and Oboza families. The fire moved westward, consuming a second block that mercifully left intact the homes of the Dizon, Sasin, Pineda, and Panganiban families, situated across the present Phil-Am building.
Embers from the burning blocks were fanned by strong winds that helped start another fire on the third block, which was to the left of the first block. Stores like Gift Mart, Three Sisters, Tung Chong Grocery, and Farmacia Pascual were reduced to ashes as the conflagration sped in the direction of the City Hall. Similarly, the flying embers from the second block crossed to the nearby chunk, gobbling up Liberty Theater. Only the Carriedo residence was spared.
From the third block, the fire jumped to another, burning the iconic Brokenshire Hospital where Grand Men Seng Hotel now stands. From the first block, the conflagration crossed Ponciano Reyes Extension, a.k.a. Crooked Road, in the direction of San Pedro Church, swallowing on its way to Gems Theater at corner San Pedro and Bolton streets, Loleng’s Refreshment Parlor, and the pre-war residence of the Lizada family.
Except for the burned trees at the government center, the iconic San Pedro Church, the Immaculate Conception College (which housed an auditorium beside), and the City Hall were past the worst. Through the years more landscape-changing conflagrations hit the city.
The urban legend gaining circulation then was that the big fire was caused by a move in the city council to change the name of San Pedro Street to something else. People were also amazed at the fact that after the nuns and students of the old ICC had tied picture frames of the Virgin Mary on the school’s fence, the fire stopped raging from the side of Bolton Street and at Mayflower Restaurant right at the back of the school and San Pedro Cathedral.
In the summer of 1965, a big fire nearly razed the entire west-end of the Santa Ana district where imposing warehouses, some of these keeping government stocks were destroyed. The National Rice and Corn Administration bodega (NARIC, forerunner of National Food Authority), sustained heavy damage, with thousands of sacks of grains ruined due to water seepage and heat. Still, this did not bar people from scavenging the stocks.
The storehouse of National Marketing Corporation (NAMARCO), on the other hand, after the blaze had subsided, showed mountains of burned commodities, from canned sardines to bottled soy sauce, literally posing threats to people who ransacked the stockroom. Only the forest patch separating the district from Rosemarie area prevented the spread of the fire.
The famous Luc Tian Restaurant, maker of the city’s most popular noodle cuisine, was partially hit by the conflagration, but was spared because of its tall firewall, which literally stopped the calamity from spreading towards the port area.
Eleven years later, the first of numerous fires to hit Quezon Boulevard, the city’s largest host of informal settlers, struck. It started when two kids, left by their lonesome on the second floor of their wooden house, played with matches. The inferno ate the residential area up to the present-day Piapi Public Market on the south, and the so-called Mini-Forest to the north.
Future mammoth fires would strike the Mabini section and other areas of the boulevard, the latest of which was in April 2014 when over 3,000 people were rendered homeless after a huge blaze destroyed the shoreline section of the old mini-forest.