San Juan Bautista
– A San Benito County supervisor briefly relived his days as a
Hollister Fire Department captain when he prevented a trailer home
from being destroyed by a Saturday afternoon blaze.
San Juan Bautista – A San Benito County supervisor briefly relived his days as a Hollister Fire Department captain when he prevented a trailer home from being destroyed by a Saturday afternoon blaze.
Anthony Botelho was driving on Mission Vineyard Road in San Juan Bautista to deliver some flowers with his cousin, Brian Bettencourt, when he saw smoke billowing from a trailer. After several minutes of being transferred between other agencies’ emergency dispatches, Botelho was finally able to alert the city’s fire department to the blaze.
“By that time I was anxious to do something about it,” he said.
With the aid of Bettencourt, the supervisor shut off the power to the trailer and used a nearby hose to contain the blaze, which originated in a kitchen stove, Botelho said.
“If Brian and I didn’t stretch the hose in there and knock down the fire significantly, that trailer would have burned to the ground,” Botelho said.
Botelho said it took the San Juan Bautista Fire Department more than 30 minutes to respond to the fire.
“What’s concerning, though, is the long response time of the fire department,” Botelho said.
The city is having trouble keeping its all-volunteer fire department staffed, San Juan Bautista Fire Capt. Chris Finstad said Monday.
The fire department had responded to a fire in the same trailer at noon, Finstad said. The residents of the trailer extinguished the kitchen fire, caused by cooking, the captain said.
The cause and full extent of damage from the second fire is still under investigation, but it damaged up to one-third of the single-wide trailer, Finstad said.
The trailer’s occupants were not home at the time of the second blaze, Botelho said.
