Night Owls Extinguish Brush Fire in Water Mill

The horrors of the wind-driven wildfires in Los Angeles were not even imprinted in the minds of Christine and Aiden Brennan when the flash and thunder of an explosion out their window startled the mother and son while they binged “Breaking Bad” in the early morning hours of a recent night.

But the wind was howling that night, and when the transformer that had exploded when hit by a falling tree rained sparks and flame into the dry underbrush below, the fire began to spread quickly.

“We heard the explosion and looked out the window and saw the transformer on fire, so we called 911, but then we saw that a fire was starting in the woods,” Christine Brennan of Water Mill recalled. Her 21-year-old son was home from college, and the pair had gotten caught up in the serial addiction of the show and lost track of time — fortuitously. It was around 12:30 a.m.

The pair grabbed a fire extinguisher from the house and dashed to the flames. In just the couple of minutes it took them to get there, the fire had started to creep outward in different directions, consuming dried leaves and dormant winter understory.

With a flashlight in the dark, the pair began dousing the flames with the fire extinguisher. When the canister ran dry, a small section was still burning and the pair snuffed out the last flames by grabbing handfuls of damp soil from under the leaves and shoveling it onto the flames.

“Nobody passed us on the road at all the entire time — if we hadn’t been up and seen it, it could have really spread,” Christine Brennan said. “I texted my neighbor to warn them before we ran out, but they didn’t see it until 3 a.m. It’s nothing like L.A., but it could have been pretty bad.”

Just as they extinguished the flames and were headed back into their house, the burning transformer fell from the utility pole — igniting a new and even bigger fire.

On cue, the flashing lights of trucks from the Southampton Fire Department came up the road. “They got there right after and put out the second fire pretty quickly,” Christine Brennan said. “We’re watching the L.A. fires now, and it’s a little scary to think what could happen if nobody sees something like that starting.”

She added, “I guess I’m glad we watched ‘Breaking Bad’ a third time.”