12-year IBEW member Brandon Pintane, a GC Transmission foreman working out of PG&E’s Lakeville substation, was tasked with replacing poles and re-conductoring the kv line following the highly destructive Soberanes Fire when he has an unusual run-in with a wild animal.
Pintane was working with PG&E Senior Wildlife Biologist Andrea Henke to evaluate an area that has been impacted by fire. As they were driving, they saw a bobcat limping down the road, apparently injured and in bad shape.
Henke was worried. “He shouldn’t be here,” she told Pintane.
After completing the task at hand, Henke told Pintane that she wanted to stop off and leave some pet food out for the bobcat.
“We saw the cat again so we stopped, and as she was in the process of getting out to leave some food for the cat, and he took off down the hill,” Pintane recounted. “[Henke] said, ‘We need to try and catch him.’ And I was thinking, ‘Are you f**king kidding me? It’s a wild animal!’ But she was already putting on her gloves, and I wasn’t going to let her go by herself, so I grabbed my gloves and went down the hill with her.”
Pintane used his cell phone to capture this photo of the bobcat in a tree
The pair looked up and down the hill, but were unable to find the injured bobcat. As they walked back up towards Pintane’s work vehicle, they spotted the cat in up in a tree right by the truck.
“He was hiding out because was scared of us, but we could tell that he had a hurt leg,” said Pintane. “We walked up to the tree and tried to find a way to get the cat down. At that point, the cat fell out of the tree, and then ran over to another burnt-out tree that was hollow inside, and he hid there where I guess he felt like it was safe.”
Pintane grabbed a duffel bag and a coat from his truck, and he and his colleague slowly surrounded the hollow tree.
“We threw the jacket over cat, and he wasn’t happy about it, obviously,” said Pintane. “His paws were all burned up from the fire, it looked like it hadn’t eaten, and there was definitely something wrong with his leg.”
They wrapped the cat up in Pintane’s jacket and put him in the duffel bag, and then carried him into Pintane’s truck. The weather was exceedingly hot, so Pintane turned up the air conditioning, and opened the duffel bag a bit to give the cat a chance to cool off. Then they drove down to the staging area, where Henke took the cat over to the animal shelter to get the medical treatment that he needed.