Kevin Lim and his wife are staying with friends for a second night. They are not being allowed back inside their Santa Clara townhome. It's still unsafe more than 24 hours after a massive fire ripped through the Boulevard townhouse complex.
"Very lucky," Lim said as he sat in his car waiting to drive away from the complex. "Thank God. Everything is good."
Just 50 feet away, the raging five alarm fire devoured two unfinished townhomes. Carlos Chaves thought his mom was cooking something, but when he looked out the window.
"A wall of flame," Chaves said as he looked out the rubble. "It was just like going. It was just like a movie."
There's not much left.
Charred wood.
Melted plastic.
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It's still hot in some spots with the heat trapped underneath the rubble.
"It's definitely not safe in there," Dave Parker, Santa Clara Fire Spokesperson said. "You can see there's a lot of still charred things that are up that could fall. There's nails in there. It's very unsteady."
Investigators say it's too early to tell if someone set the fire. NBC Bay Area spoke with the property owner Shea Homes.
"It's hard to fathom why anyone would ever do something like that," Layne Marceau, Shea Homes President, said.
He revealed the the timeline of events of Wednesday night's fire.
"We're still just at the framing stage. There really and that no one was on site for almost three to four hours. It's odd," Marceau said. But fire investigators say the fire was so large they're still having a hard time figuring out where it started. "No electrical, no plumbing, it was just basically still at the framing stage. Unfortunately that means – that’s why you saw the kind of fire that we had," Marceau said.
