By Bill Finley
Pierre Bellocq, the husband of Martine Bellocq, said Tuesday that his wife has made slight improvement since being burned in the Dec. 7 fire at San Luis Rey Downs, but added that she had a long battle ahead of her.
“It's going to be a very long healing process and a very long medical process, but she is out of critical care,” said Bellocq, who served as the co-trainer with his wife of a six-horse stable at San Luis Rey. “She is still in very serious condition. She has had some surgeries, about four of them already on the skin, and has many more to come. The progress is there, but it is very, very little. It's going to take a long time. According to the heart monitor, she apparently can hear me when I talk to her now, but she can't communicate at all yet. It's going to take time, but the care at this hospital [the Burn Center at UC San Diego Health] is extraordinary. I do believe she will return to a normal life, but even the doctors don't know if it is going to take six months or nine months or how long. It depends on how her burns heal.”
Bellocq described a harrowing and chaotic scene at San Luis Rey when the fire swept through the training center. He said his wife put the safety of the horses over her own as the two worked feverishly to get their horses out of harm's way. Bellocq said he had rescued a horse and went to take it to the training track, and warned his wife not to go back in the barn.
“We had a very nice, unraced 2-year-old colt,” Bellocq said of a horse named Wild Bill Hickory (Many Rivers). “He was a beautiful specimen, starting to train on. He was sort of the star of the show, and unfortunately, he was in the worst possible spot when everything went to hell. She had tried first hosing down the stalls of the horses. Then it just exploded. She went in there to try to get him out to save him, and got as far as the shedrow, and the horse was just engulfed in flames and so was she, basically. She wouldn't have done it any other way, outside of being physically dragged away and I was too late to do that when the barn just exploded.”
While noting his wife's heroic act, he said he is more focused on the results of her decision to go in after the horse.
“It's something that is perhaps frustrating, because I was trying to convince her not to put her life in danger,” he said. “I asked her not to go in there after I left with the horse and when I got back to the barn, I found her on the ground in the state she was in. Third-degree burns over 60% of her body. I would have much preferred that she didn't get burned the way she did.”
Bellocq admitted to wondering if he did enough to keep his wife away from the fire.
“In retrospect, should I have done this, should I have done that?” he said. “It kind of haunts me all day, all night, really. But I know she wouldn't have done anything other than what she did to try to save the horse.”
Once he found his wife, Bellocq's next goal was to get her medical care as soon as possible. Despite the chaos that had overtaken the training center as the fires raged, he was able to track down help.
“It was a question of getting her in a golf cart,” Bellocq said. “It was like a wild circus, but I had to get her to the one exit at the training track and try to get the medics to alleviate the pain. There were something like 100 vans and trailers there and the police were totally overwhelmed. It was just a mess, but they got her airlifted to where she is now.”
Bellocq said there was one point a few minutes earlier when the situation looked like it was going to be manageable.
“I was there trying to help out until the fire truck could get there,” he said. “On the perimeter of the barn, where the fire was already raging, everyone was helping with shovels and trying to fight off the fires. It looked like it was going to be under control and then it flared up on the other side and I ran up the hill to help them put out the fires there. All this time, Martine was trying to hose everything down and it looked like it might be under control and then I looked around and the palm trees caught fire, and I knew that was the end of it. I ran back there and started grabbing one horse at a time, going down the line. It was just too late. In maybe two minutes, three minutes, it was over. It was really a catastrophe.”
The Bellocqs lost two horses in the fire. Bellocq said the other four that were saved are doing fine.
“The other four are good, they are okay,” the horseman said. “They are training at Del Mar and they survived the ordeal quite well. A few bumps and scratches, but nothing more. They all seem to be okay, breathing-wise, so we are going on with their training right now.”
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