By FRANCISCO E. JIMENEZ
Staff Writer
reporter@sbnewspaper.com
First responders with the San Benito Fire Department had their hands full early Thursday morning following numerous telephone pole fires.
“We had 25 city calls, but 21 were pole fires and one of them was a wire down,” said San Benito Fire Department Chief of Operations Raul Zuniga.
According to Zuniga, the calls began at approximately 5:25 a.m. at about the time a cold front blew in. The initial call was regarding smoke in the area.
“We went to check it out,” Zuniga said. “It was the dust that had blown in with that front.”
The chief added, “My first pole fire was at 6:15 a.m. We had fires up until 8 a.m. this morning. It was 21 pole fires inside the city, one wire down in the city, one incident involving the smoke, and 11 pole fires outside the city.”
SBFD Assistant Chief of Operations T.J. Tijerina said the telephone pole fires were a result of a combination of rain, high winds and dust causing the wires to short.
“We had the rain that came in, and then with all this dirt that was flying all over these past few days accumulated over the wiring,” said Tijerina. “When the rain comes it doesn’t rain hard, it just drizzles and creates a mist. That shorts out all this electrical wiring. That’s why we had an accumulated number of calls about the poles on fire and shorting out.”
Zuniga said that the SBFD responded to a total of 37 calls in reference to at least 34 separate incidents within the city limits and in the county.
“Myself and the assistant officer were out there,” said Zuniga. “I ended up manning a truck with another firefighter. The assistant went with another firefighter in a brush truck. We had different units out instead of just the crew that was there.”
The fires created problems elsewhere. As reported via the San Benito News Facebook and Twitter pages on Thursday, one of the telephone pole fires resulted in classes being canceled at the San Benito Veterans Memorial Academy. The fire led to a power outage at the school that required at least five hours to fix. San Benito CISD Superintendent of Schools Antonio G. Limón said that parents were encouraged to pick up their children while students who ride the bus stayed in a classroom or gym area, where they were fed and instructed.
Zuniga said the location of the telephone pole that caught fire and lead to the VMA outage is on a vacant lot off Williams Road just beyond the campus. “It still affected the school,” Zuniga said. “They had a partial power outage. The estimation was that it was going to take four hours to fix it, that’s why they authorized the parents to pick up the students.”
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