The Abridged version:
- A deadly explosion erupted at a fireworks facility on the outskirts of Esparto a year ago.
- As the explosion and its aftermath remain front of mind, residents of the small town in western Yolo County point to things beyond destruction and death that define their home.
- Wounds are far from healed, but life in Esparto continues.
Longtime residents of Esparto tend to use similar words when describing their hometown.
“It’s a very nice, quiet community,” said Lisette Santillan, who has lived in the small town at the foot of Capay Valley for more than 30 years. “Everybody knows everybody.”
With fewer than 4,000 residents, Esparto is a place people wind up in for a reason — family ties, work, a slower pace.
For Santillan, it was her father, who grew up in Esparto and moved his family back after a career in the U.S. Army. Now, the town is where she’s raising her own kids, sending them to schools where they’re taught by some of the same teachers she had.
Last summer, Santillan’s hometown was disquieted by a tragedy that made national headlines. An illegal fireworks facility hosting a million pounds of explosives ignited, causing a series of explosions that killed seven workers and shook Esparto, rattling its buildings and upending the otherwise quiet town.
Media descended, sharing dramatic images and accounts of the flaming aftermath, which took days to put out. Details emerged about the owners and operators of the facility, which was owned by a Yolo County sheriff’s lieutenant.
The long-running fireworks company based at the property, Devastating Pyrotechnics, was owned by Kenneth Chee, a felon disqualified from holding a federal explosives license. Another company, BlackStar Fireworks, was owned by Craig Cutright, a volunteer firefighter with the Esparto department.
The disaster prompted questions of who knew what, raising the specter of negligence that seemed to rely on local connections and a willingness to look the other way.
“It wasn’t the best way to get our name on the map,” Santillan said.
A year later, residents in Esparto are still contending with the tragedy. Along Yolo Avenue, the main thoroughfare through town, business owners and passersby said it remains a divisive issue, and many have avoided sharing their opinions at risk of offending their neighbors.
At the same time, people like Santillan point to all the things that have made, and continue to make, the quiet, rural town a place worth living. There’s the sparkling new community pool, filled to the brim on summer afternoons with noisy kids on break, or the softball team organized by Santillan’s boss at The Ravine on Sixteen bar that recently won a championship in Las Vegas, or the local hardware store, where long conversations are as available as household wares.
For the outside world, the name Esparto — to the extent it’s known at all — conjures images of tragedy and devastation. But for those who call it home, the tight-knit town set at the base of golden, oak-studded hills remains the place where they watch their kids grow, catch up with friends over a cup of coffee and share a lawnmower with their neighbors.
Part of life
When Sandie Reed moved from Orange County to Esparto years ago, it took her a while to find her place in the community.
“It was hard to meet people,” she said.
In time, she joined groups like the Esparto Chamber of Commerce and the Esparto Citizens Advisory Committee. And she found her neighbors willing to help with local causes, such as the long-running Almond Festival.
“It’s people coming together to make sure people are taken care of,” she said.
Through that engagement, Reed started feeling more comfortable in town.
“It really does support you,” she said. “I find that very comforting.”
But there were still things that didn’t quite make sense to her, like spontaneous fireworks displays that would start seemingly at random.
When she asked around, the response was usually just, “They’ve always been doing this.”
The late Jerry Matsumara, who owned and farmed on the property that would eventually explode, was known as a pyrotechnics enthusiast who put on multiple shows per year for decades.
Each spring and fall, he set off one fireworks blast in the afternoon to let the town know a show would be coming that evening. That signal, according to a civil grand jury report released in March, served as a courtesy reminder for residents to keep an eye on their animals.
In effect, Reed said, the sound and presence of fireworks became an accepted part of life in Esparto.
An illegal ‘conspiracy’
After Matsumara died, the property was passed on to his daughters, one of whom is the wife of Sam Machado, a Yolo County sheriff’s lieutenant until recently, who has been charged with murder and other alleged crimes tied to the explosions.
Under the care of the Machados and business partners from around the state, the property added shipping containers, trucks, loading zones and other amenities that allowed Devastating Pyrotechnics and BlackStar Fireworks to sell roughly 11 million pounds of illegal fireworks in a decade, according to court records.
The civil grand jury report alleges that county officials knew about the facility and neglected to enforce local ordinances prohibiting this type of business in the unincorporated parts of the county. A response from the county disagreed and took issue with those claims.
According to the grand jury, code enforcement officials received a tip about the property and said in emails that they would “tread lightly” during an inspection because it was owned by sheriff’s deputies with whom they worked.
No enforcement action was taken until after the blast, when eight people were indicted with crimes connected to the facility — including five who were charged with murder — alleging a decadelong conspiracy to establish what authorities have called a “Northern California hub for an illegal enterprise.”
Three of the accused, Sam Machado, Tammy Machado and Craig Cutright, were Esparto residents with jobs reliant on public trust: the Machados in the sheriff’s department and Cutright as a volunteer firefighter.
Reed said the first six months after the explosion were intense in town. People defaulted to avoiding conversation about the incident. When it came up, some had mixed feelings about the people behind the businesses whom they had known and socialized with.
That complicated web of connections made public discourse fraught with emotion.
“Everybody has a real strong opinion about this,” she said. “It’s a little better now, but for the longest time it was pretty intense.”
Known and unkown
Just over a mile from the center of town sits all that is left of the site where multiple illegal fireworks businesses operated. Looking at it today, you see a few vehicles that have been torn apart and burned, a chimney standing alone where a house once stood and shrapnel from shipping containers littered across the property.
Aside from the wreckage, ongoing cleanup has transformed the property from the smoking blast site it was months ago. Where jagged pieces of torched metal once stuck out of the ground, tall plants grow freely, birds flitting between them. When not working, an excavator and other pieces of heavy equipment are parked quietly in the center of the property.
The cleanup is far from done, and locals continue to speculate about whether the chemicals from the site found their way into the surrounding water, soil or crops.
Questions about what happened, and who knew what, remain close to the surface, fostering a sense of uncertainty and mistrust in an otherwise tight-knit place.
But tragedy is not all there is to Esparto. People there don’t define their hometown by one of its worst moments.
That goes for Santillan, too.
Before getting back to pouring “the coldest beers in town” to thirsty customers on a recent weekday, she smiled when she thought of the place where she built her life.
“Our community is really good,” she said.
Daniel Hennessy joins Abridged from the California Local News Fellowship. He’s a reporter covering Yolo County.