(The Center Square) – A small plane crashed early Thursday morning in a foggy San Diego Navy neighborhood, killing at least two people on the plane, damaging houses and burning cars as jet fuel hit the street.
The Cessna 550 jet flying from Wichita, Kan. crashed east of Montgomery-Gibbs Executive Airport around 3:45 a.m., authorities said.
The crash was on military land, in the Tierrasanta neighborhood of Navy families in Murphy Canyon.
Six people on the ground were injured, and 10 to 15 homes were damaged in the area populated by Navy personnel and their families on military land, authorities said. Only one person needed to be transported to the hospital.
All the fatalities appeared to have been on the plane, Dan Eddy, assistant San Diego fire-rescue chief of emergency operations, told reporters at a press conference.
More than 100 members of the Navy community were evacuated to nearby Miller Elementary School after their homes were damaged by the crash and its fires, authorities said.
Officials during an 11 a.m. news conference stood in front of a house that was badly burned. Eddy said occupants were able to get out unscathed.
The crash is under investigation by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board.
Eddy said he didn’t know how many were on the plane, but added a Cessna 550 is designed to carry up to 10 people including a pilot.
“I can’t quite put words to describe what this scene looks like, but with the jet fuel going down the street and everything on fire all at once, it was pretty horrific to to see for the police officers and firefighters to run in there, start trying to evacuate people out of the way, and doing anything and everything they could to try to save somebody’s life is really heroic,” San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl told reporters during an earlier news conference.
Eddy said all the cars on both sides of the street burned, but noted firefighters extinguished every blaze except for one stubborn car fire.
First responders performed two searches of every home in the neighborhood and, after daylight came, added a drone to make searches, Eddy said. First responders were looking for people and plane debris.
The debris field is large, the assistant fire chief said, because of the size of the aircraft and its speed.
A Cessna 550 is 47 feet long, according to various sources.
Many of the questions at Thursday’s press conferences concerned the Navy families who are suddenly without housing.
The Navy will do everything it can to help them, Capt. Robert Heely, commanding officer of Navy Base San Diego, told reporters. He said the Navy was putting some families in hotels while others chose to stay with family members or friends.
“There’s a community-wide effort to bring a lot of the services we need,” he said.
“Certainly they [the families] were shocked to wake up to this,” Heely said. “We’ll be by their side to make sure they’re properly cared for.”
The neighborhood is one of the largest military housing areas in the world, Heely said.
Authorities praised sailors and Marines who helped efforts to get their neighbors to safety.
“Like the gentlemen behind me, we’re trained to act in a crisis mode,” Heely said, referring to the fire and police authorities behind him.
Officials, including San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, expressed condolences to those affected by the crash. “It’s a tragedy, and our hearts are with those who were impacted.”
