Off-Duty Firefighter Stops Spreading Blaze

An off-duty firefighter dressed in only shorts and a T-shirt crawled into a burning house with a garden hose to battle the blaze and was credited Friday with confining the blaze to one room.

Capt. Tom Wall, a 17-year veteran with the Orange County Fire Authority, was sitting at home watching television with his son about 9:30 p.m. Thursday when he was alerted to a fire three doors down. He slipped into some running shoes and dashed toward the three-bedroom house in the 1500 block of Kenneth Drive, where another neighbor was trying to break a window to get inside.

“I crawled about 10 feet inside the house and just started squirting water into the fire,” said Wall, 43, who was back at work Friday. “It was burning pretty hot, and I could see flames against the wall and to the ceiling.”

By the time firefighters arrived a few minutes later, the fire was confined to the family room, where an electrical short circuit in a battery charger had sparked the blaze, said Dennis Shell, spokesman for the Fire Authority. Twenty-one firefighters then took less than five minutes to contain the fire, which caused damages estimated at $15,000.

No one was injured and the occupants of the three-bedroom house were not home at the time.