Hero cop braved flames
Published: November 1, 2006
Bruce Thompson knew everyone living in a converted church when he twice braved flames that surrounded him as he tried to crawl along the floor.
“It made it all the more urgent,” the 22-year OPP veteran said yesterday while guarding the scorched downtown Parish Apartments.
“It’s a small town … I’ve been here so long,” the genial officer said when asked to talk publicly for the first time about trying to reach Angie and George Dillabough and basement tenant Kevin Lewins early Friday.
Reluctant at first, saying “I don’t to blow my own horn,” Thompson insisted “the real heroes are the firefighters, a great bunch of guys who risk their lives every time they go into a building. We’re a team, but they have the equipment and are trained to fight fires.”
Despite the lack of a breathing mask and a bunker protective suit, he tried first alone to get in, but “was forced to the floor. Flames were coming up from below.”
Minutes later, holding onto the belt of Const. James Orser to avoid being separated, they made a second attempt but were also driven back by fire, heat and smoke.
‘IT’S INSTINCT’
“In the back of your head, you say you have to try again,” Thompson said, his voice trailing. “It’s instinct.”
The adults and the couple’s two sons survived — one boy with burns now in hospital — but his two sisters died.
Const. Thompson, 48, on patrol around 1:45 a.m., gave the first alarm, which brought 30 Trent Hills Fire Department volunteers.
Dillabough “told me his kids were inside.”
When their son Joshua, 12, threw his toy truck through a glass pane at the back of the century-old former prayer hall, “I helped carry him out the window with the help of a firefighter,” Thompson said. “You do what you have to do.”
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