At 8:19 a.m. last Tuesday, July 3, a Half Moon Bay Fire Protection District engine sped down Capistrano Road to answer a hazardous materials call at the Harbor House in Princeton.
Three hours later, when emergency personnel were wrapping up the haz-mat scene, the engine sped the other way on Capistrano to answer a call at Ketch Joanne Restaurant.
 Firefighters study the embers from a fire on the roof of Ketch Joanne in Princeton on July 3. It was one of three calls on the coast that morning. |
"I would call it an atypical situation," said Clayton Jolley, acting fire marshal for the Half Moon Bay Fire Protection District.
No one was injured at any of the locations.
Jolley said that the haz-mat call at the Harbor House brought in all three of the Half Moon Bay district engines - two from Half Moon Bay and one from Point Montara - plus county personnel from the Office of Emergency Services/Homeland Security, Environmental Health and the Sheriff's office. The call concerned a five-gallon container of "contaminated gasoline," said Jolley, gas that had been found under an overturned trash can. OES Supervisor Bill O'Callahan said that the Office of Environmental Health now has the liquid. Haz-mat scenes require a strict protocol that can consume a lot of time and resources.
"Whenever you have an unknown hazardous materials incident," Jolley said, "it can often be a two- or three-hour response. That tends to tie up engine companies longer than usual."
When the Main Street fire was called in, four engines responded. Those engines came from CalFire's San Mateo County district and included a battalion chief to take charge of the scene, since Jolley was still at the Harbor House site.
The last call of the morning, an electrical fire on the roof of Ketch Joanne, brought one Half Moon Bay district engine from the Harbor House and one engine from San Mateo County's CalFire. A third engine from Pacifica was en route but got called off before it hit the scene.
CalFire's San Mateo and Santa Cruz counties Chief John Ferreira said the busy Tuesday morning -coming as a contract between Half Moon Bay Fire Protection District and CalFire is still being debated -served as a useful demonstration of why multiple agencies might consolidate their firefighting efforts here on the Coastside and on the Peninsula at large.
"As things degrade because of simultaneous calls, more and more agencies respond," Ferreira said. County firefighting agencies respond according to a "move and cover plan," said Ferreira. That enables the closest available engine to respond to the most recent fire.
"It's common to go over the hill or up the coast," Ferreira said. "It's uncommon that they got three calls at once."
A week after the scare, Ketch Joanne's manager, Albert Dunne, felt lucky that the restaurant's roof didn't ignite at a less convenient time and with fewer firefighters in the area.
"It's gotta be the luckiest fire I've ever seen," Dunne said.
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