Sun Valley home goes up in smoke
$8 million in damage
By GREG STAHL
Express Staff Writer
A fire almost destroyed a Sun Valley home last Wednesday afternoon,
inflicting over $8 million in damage.
By Friday morning, the Sun Valley Fire Department was still extinguishing
spot fires in the 10,000-square-foot Fairway Road home. The cause of the fire was unknown
as of yesterday morning.
"It was a real tough fire to put out," Sun Valley fire chief
Jeff Carnes said in a Friday interview.
Carnes said his department had to take creative approaches to
extinguishing the fire.
"We pushed things to their limits," he said.
The home is owned by Orange County, Calif., resident George Argyros.
Argyros owned the Seattle Mariners from 1981 to 1989 and is the chief executive of Arnel
& Affiliates, a West Coast investment company. He was unavailable for comment.
"It was one of the show homes on the Fairways," Carnes said,
describing ornate wall coverings, paintings, sculptures and wooden interior walls.
"Everywhere there was stuff."
Additionally, the home was very well constructed, Carnes said, which added
to the difficulty of extinguishing the fire.
"It was built like Fort Knox," he said. "That house is so
well constructed and so beefy and heavy. Fires got into areas where it would stay in for a
day or two and then pop back out again.
"To us, fire is kind of a living, breathing thing. It reacts to
everything you do to it. In this case, [the fire] gets into these concealed spaces, and
there’s so much fuel for it. It stays alive for hours--in this case, days.
"At one point it got so dangerous to be on the roof or in the house
because things were falling—elk heads, chandeliers. At one point the kitchen floor
caved in."
Carnes said the Sun Valley and Ketchum fire departments were paged at
12:57 p.m. on Wednesday, and the Sun Valley department was on the scene at 1:02 p.m.
Carnes said he called for backup from the Hailey Fire Department and Wood River Fire and
Rescue almost immediately after arriving on scene.
In all, there were about 38 firefighters on the scene, he said.
Carnes said Wood River’s and Ketchum’s aerial spraying engines
were instrumental in getting the fire under control.
"Tactically, it’s been very challenging," he said.
Carnes said the home was worth about $5 million and its contents worth
about $3 million. The house is still standing, he added, and the eastern two thirds are
"not too bad."
"Everything was smoke damaged for sure, but there are rooms that are
untouched on the right side of the house," he said.
