Teens Use Beer to Put Out Highway Brush Fire

When a brush fire that was in the early stages of getting out of hand started to threaten wildlife, two teenagers took matters into their own hands and saved the day.

19-year-old Gabriel Carillo and 18-year-old Evelyn Williams saw the fire getting out of control in the Tonto National Forrest, and tried calling the fire department and even drove to the sheriff's station looking for help, but nobody was around.

The two were driving to work around 4:30am on Memorial Day.

"We happened to notice a thing of smoke off to the right-hand side,” Carrillo told AZ Family. He said it was about 100 yards off the roadway. "When we had stopped, we saw the fire was not a controlled fire; it was an out-of-control fire, a wildfire."

He explained looking for help when none was around.

“We drove down to the sheriff’s station, which was a quarter mile down the road, and there was nobody there... We turned around and took it into our own hands," said Carillo. "We are protecting private land; we are protecting the homes that are about two miles back, and Salt River access, Saguaro Lake access, and all the fires that have burnt out our area."

Carillo said he and Williams are tired of seeing fires destroy their communities, so they used what they had; their hands and feet.

"We just used what we had, which was our hands and our feet. We started kicking dirt."

After about an hour, they had kicked the fire to a smolder, but with no water, the embers continued to glow and could reignite.

A man on his way to the lake nearby with his boat stopped to help and had a 30-rack of beer with him, so they all cracked the beers open and poured them on the embers, dousing out any possibility of reignition.

The two isn't old enough to drink, but hopefully they cracked open a cold one to admire what they'd accomplished.

“I wasn't thinking I’m a hero," Carillo said. "I wasn’t thinking we were doing this for anything else. We are doing this because it is saving our job, it’s saving the road that gets everyone out to the river to have fun, and it’s saving the homes that are behind us."

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Source: Teens Use Beer to Put Out Highway Brush Fire

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