Firefighter Bridges Borders to Help Comrades

While vacationing in Mexico four years ago, Joe Martinez did what many firefighters do when traveling: He visited a fire station.

He swapped stories and tricks of the trade at Ciudad Obregon’s two-story concrete fire station. While there, Martinez was told about two young men who started visiting the station when they were about 8.

When they were teenagers, the two became firefighters.

They died almost a decade later, battling a commercial building fire in February 1998, just months before Martinez’s visit.

Unlike U.S. firefighters, the young Mexican firefighters didn’t have personal alarm locators, which emit a loud chirp to signal an emergency. Outside, the other firefighters didn’t know their comrades were in trouble; and even if they had, their air tanks were spent, and they would not have been able to attempt a rescue.

Martinez had traveled to the town to visit Ana Luisa Barreras, the woman who would become his wife.

The dead firefighters’ story, the department’s hardships and the blossoming romance all were reasons the 39-year-old firefighter kept going back. Since 1999, the Santa Maria firefighter has ferried equipment to Mexico and has forged a relationship with the Woodland Hills Rotary Club to further help the Obregon firefighters.

He has returned to Ciudad Obregon several times with more than 2,000 feet of fire hose, 40 sets of turnout jackets, helmets, pants, boots and gloves; a dozen breathing air packs; a dozen personal alarm locators; and more than 30 smoke alarms for Ciudad Obregon schools.

“Every time he goes back, it’s like a great friend has arrived,” said his wife, Ana Luisa Martinez. “Firefighters in my hometown don’t have academies, they don’t have the training or the equipment.... Over there, it’s ‘Jump in there and get out however you can.’ ”

Martinez said he was impressed by the Mexican firefighters’ determination to keep equipment working.

“They repair, repair, repair. They squeeze as much juice out of that lemon as they can,” he said. “They weld things together, they tape things together. It’s not like us, where something busts once and we replace it.”

But taking the equipment across the border was hard. Mexican officials repeatedly told Martinez, as they have told other firefighters, that he could not take the gear into the country.

Martinez said he began leaving equipment with the Fire Department in Nogales, Ariz., until the Ciudad Obregon Fire Department could pick it up.

Fernando Gamboa, the Mexican consul in Oxnard, said the difficulties Martinez encountered stem from NAFTA regulations, Mexican bureaucratic requirements and concerns that some people may be profiting from equipment that they claim is a charitable donation.

As his bond with the townspeople grew, Martinez discovered an ally in the Woodland Hills Rotary Club, which has had a relationship with the club in Ciudad Obregon for more than 30 years.

The Rotary Club first sent a firetruck to Ciudad Obregon in the mid-1980s.

Since then, the club’s donations have included three fire engines, an ambulance and a ladder truck.

In 2001, the Rotary Club footed the bill for a visit by Martinez and his colleague, Fire Capt. Greg Welch, to the town.

Martinez taught the firefighters of Ciudad Obregon and nearby towns how to get out of burning buildings; Welch repaired the department’s air compressors.

In 2002, Martinez and colleague Tony Clayburg took firefighters to a junkyard to teach them how to pull injured occupants out of wrecks. They also took more than 30 blindfolded and masked firefighters into a vacant building to teach them how to follow hoses out of burning buildings.

The lesson proved to be an emotional experience for firefighters who were there when their two young comrades died. “It almost became a grieving session,” Martinez said.

Ernesto Partida Lopez, 26, and Jesus Medrano Felix, 28, were boys when they began visiting the fire station as bomberitos juveniles, or juvenile firefighters, receiving safety lessons from the veteran firefighters.

Partida and Medrano had been battling the blaze on the second floor of a building when part of the roof collapsed, said Ciudad Obregon Fire Chief Juan Ernesto De Acha Blanco.

“We didn’t have the equipment to get them out. There were a lot of things we didn’t have,” he said. “They were young men, but they had a lot of experience. And yet, they died in that building.”

In February, the Rotary Club will pay for Martinez and two firefighters to travel to Ciudad Obregon to teach high-angle rescues, because the city has so many grain elevators and wells.

“Regardless of borders,” Martinez said, “no firefighter has to die.”

Martinez had no connection to Ciudad Obregon before a New Year’s Eve trip in 1997.

Had it not been for a friend’s invitation, he would never have heard about Partida and Medrano.

And he wouldn’t have met the person who would inspire him to keep going back.

Martinez said he quickly fell in love with Ana Luisa Barreras.

When he returned in the summer to meet her parents, he visited the fire station for the first time and a bond was forged.

For the couple’s wedding in April 1999, the Obregon firefighters brought Ana Luisa to the church on a fire engine.

With sirens blaring, fire engines ushered the pair to their hotel reception, causing people to run out of their hotel rooms.

“People were running out in their underwear,” Martinez said.