Massive fire destroys shuttered Patterson hospital

A shuttered hospital plagued by theft, break-ins and trespassing burned to the ground Tuesday morning under what officials are calling suspicious circumstances.

“All three wings of the hospital were fully involved in fire, which is suspicious because if it were fireworks (that caused it) it would be just a portion of the building (that was on fire),” said Jeff Gregory, Interim Fire Chief for Patterson and West Stanislaus Fire Department.

He said for years transients have frequented the former Del Puerto Hospital at E and Ninth streets, stealing wiring, pipes and any other scrap metal. Efforts by owners to secure the buildings have failed – boards are pulled off of windows and fencing cut through or torn down.

Gregory said firefighters from his department as well as crews from Ceres, Modesto, Keyes and Cal Fire battled the blaze, which was reported just before 4 a.m.

Firefighters on two ladder trucks kept water on the fire from the outside, preventing it from spreading to the Patterson Ambulance headquarters and a Gould medical building on the same corner.

Gregory said it was unsafe to enter the building because of “booby traps” set up by squatters like carpets covering large holes in the floor leading to the basement below.

The facility was still too hot for fire investigators to start looking into a cause and origin Tuesday afternoon.

The hospital opened in the mid-1940s. It ran into financial problems in the 1990s, going into debt by more than $670,000, according to a Bee story detailing the hospital's impending closure in March 1998.

It struggled because while it had 17 acute-care beds, many acute-care patients were sent to Memorial or Doctors medical centers in Modesto instead.

In 2000, the Del Puerto Health Care District sold the shuttered hospital to Elan Senior Living, which opened a residential drug and alcohol treatment center in part of the building. As part of the sale agreement, Elan was expected to open by December 2001 a 24-hour primary care center in the hospital. Instead, a doctor was available from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. four days per week.

The district levied $5,000-per-month fines against Elan for failing to meet the terms of the agreement.

In 2003, Elan closed the drug and alcohol treatment facility as well, and the building remained vacant. It was purchased by Joe Garcia of Patterson about a year ago.

Reached late Tuesday afternoon, Garcia said he did hot have time to comment on the fire or his plans for the site.

This story was originally published July 5, 2016 at 8:13 AM with the headline "Massive fire destroys shuttered Patterson hospital."