SACRAMENTO COUNTY, Calif. — Fire crews in Sacramento County were kept busy Thursday night with dozens of illegal fireworks causing damage and destruction.
In one case, a homeowner is now without a garage after it caught fire.
It happened in a quiet neighborhood known as the Little Pocket, where a charred garage is now boarded up at the 600 block of Piedmont Drive.
According to the Sacramento Fire Department, illegal fireworks were placed inside a garbage can beside the house and that's what caused the fire.
Crews were able to quickly put out the fire between the two houses and it kept from getting inside either home.
About 30 minutes away, in Antelope, several teens were detained Thursday night after they allegedly threw mortars at oncoming traffic on Heartland Drive and Tetotom Park Way.
Logan Henson, who lives down the road, says he showed up out of curiosity because something similar happened last year.
"All of sudden, people start throwing like these mortars on the ground and one landed probably where that car is. Like five feet, 10 feet away and you just gotta run. And then we were running away from it. And you just see the sparks from it fly over your head. It was like a warzone out there last night," said Henson.
He says the group of teens made their way here to Firestone Park.
There you can see multiple bushes were burned, and the intensity of the heat melted part of this Stop sign at the intersection.
Sacramento Metro Fire says county-wide, the fire dispatch center was flooded with more than 2,500 calls.
"Looking at just the 911 calls, they had over 1,400 calls. Last year the same day they had about a thousand. So a 45% increase in call volume just for our dispatchers that were working hard to get the resources where they needed to be," said Sacramento Metro Fire Battalion Chief Parker Wilbourn.
As we go further into the holiday weekend, the calls are not expected to stop.
"As we continue to experience extreme heat, our fuels are continuing to dry up and continuing to be primed up to burn. It just takes one small spark. But all of those things played into our massive increase in call volume last night and we anticipate that being the case through the weekend," said Wilbourn.
Sacramento Fire says they have 46 citations going out to homeowners through the mail, where crews documented illegal fireworks and how much they're being charged.
