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Offshore fire destroys UAVs, building

SAN DIEGO — Federal fire investigators are looking into the cause of a Jan. 22 fire that destroyed a building housing and about a half-dozen unmanned aerial vehicles at an offshore training area, a Navy spokesman said Monday.

No one was in the warehouse and classroom building when the fire broke out about 2 a.m. at an old airstrip on San Clemente Island, said Cmdr. Greg Geisen, a Naval Special Warfare Command spokesman in Coronado, Calif.

Federal fire crews assigned on the island responded to the fire, which destroyed the building that served as an UAV training facility for Naval Special Warfare Group 1, Geisen said.

The fire was extinguished about 5 a.m.

“There were probably some half-dozen UAVs in the building, along with control equipment,” he said.

A Humvee parked alongside the building also was destroyed in the fire, he said. He did not know what types of UAVs were in the facility at the time, and estimates of the damage were not yet available, he said.

Navy personnel who were using the facility for training last week were in the barracks several miles north when the fire broke out.

“It will definitely have some impact on the training in the near-term,” Geisen said.

San Clemente Island, which sits off the San Diego coast south of the Channel Islands, is part of the Navy’s larger Southern California Offshore Range complex that’s mainly used for live-fire exercises, demolition training, antisubmarine warfare and naval bombardment. Naval Special Warfare Command maintains a large training compound near the island’s airfield in the northern section.