Gas Station Worker Turned Off Pumps, Helped Passengers

Carlos Martinez, who works weekends at the Chevron station across from Burbank Airport, had just finished ringing up snacks for a customer when he felt his body shudder from the roar of a nearby jet.

When he looked out the window, Martinez saw a red-and-gold Southwest Airlines 737 barreling across Hollywood Way, its nose heading straight for him.

“Man, it looked just like ‘Con Air,’ ” said the 18-year-old Martinez, referring to a scene in a movie in which a plane lands on a Las Vegas street. “There were pieces of a fence spinning in the propellers and the plane was coming right into the minimart. I was going to run, but there was nowhere to go.”

Martinez, a senior at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in Sun Valley, was behind the cash register Sunday night at 6:11 p.m. when Southwest Airlines Flight 1455 slid off the runway, crashed through a restraining fence and came to a screeching halt less than 50 feet from the gas station’s pumps. He has worked at the station for six months and often thought the runway across the street looked a little close, he said.

“And I was just wondering the other day, when it was raining, if a plane had ever slid off the runway and into the street,” Martinez said.

When that did happen, Martinez’s instincts were unflappable. As soon as he saw the plane break through the barrier fence, he hit the emergency switch to the gas pumps and shut off the gas flow. Then he called 911. Then he called his boss, Benny Natanzi, the station’s owner.

“I said, ‘Hey, Carlos, don’t joke around with me,’ ” Natanzi said, remembering his reaction to the call he got at his Winnetka home. “At first I thought the kid was kidding. But then I could tell he was scared.”

Natanzi, whose family partnership owns several gas stations in Southern California, told Martinez he had done the right thing switching off the pumps. Martinez then hung up the phone and dashed outside.

“The passengers were panicking, screaming ‘Oh, my God! Oh, my God!’ and jumping down from the wings,” he said. “They didn’t know where to run. They were just looking around everywhere.”

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Seeing fluid dripping from the wings, Martinez yelled to the passengers to run away from the plane toward Winona Avenue. Then he sprinted over to the plastic slides that extended from the damaged plane and began to help evacuate people. Many seemed shellshocked, he said.

One older woman started crying as soon as Martinez pulled her to her feet. He hugged her and told her to calm down.

“She was really upset, man,” he said.

At the end of the night, Martinez, who lives with his family in Arleta, was overcome with emotion. Saving people from plane wrecks isn’t what he’d signed up for in his $6.25-per-hour job.

His mother was waiting for him in the kitchen when he got home. As soon as he walked in, she hugged him and started crying.

Soon, he was crying, too.

“I feel like God has given me a second chance,” he said. “What happened out there was very close.”