Firefighters rescue girls from blaze
Published: March 15, 2007
Firefighters crawled through a smoke-filled Flatbush apartment early Wednesday to rescue three unconscious girls who were trapped after candles left in a bathroom sparked a blaze, fire officials said.
Responding to desperate cries from the girls’ relatives, Lt. Richard Buckheit, 36, twice entered the sixth-floor apartment on Linden Place, crawling past the flames in the bathroom and emerging with a 7-year-old and a 4-year-old. Firefighter Vincent Tavella, 38, then saved the other girl, also 4.
Two of the girls — one with burns over 25 percent of her body — were in critical condition at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital Weill Cornell Medical Center’s Burn Center. The other girl was taken to The Brookdale Hospital and Medical Center in stable condition, a Fire Department spokesman said.
“I saw hysterical people shouting their babies were inside,” Buckheit said at a news conference at the Engine Company 248 stationhouse hours after the rescue.
“‘Please help my baby.’”
Buckheit, who is assigned to Engine Company 249 in Brooklyn, was working overtime for Engine Company 248 when the call came in around 3:15 a.m. He was running up the stairs and had reached the fifth floor when he saw flames shooting from apartment F26 on the sixth floor. He continued up the stairs.
“What’s going through your mind is ‘I’m prepared for this,’” he said. “I’ve done it a million times in practice.”
Buckheit, who could not see anything in the dark, smoke-filled apartment, put on his oxygen mask and felt his way on his hands and knees to a back bedroom, where he thought the children were trapped.
“Sure enough, I found a small child,” he said, of his discovery of the 7-year-old.
He crawled out, shielding the girl from flames in the burning bathroom, before leaving her in the hallway with neighbors and heading back for the others. When Buckheit came out with the second girl, Tavella, of Rescue 2, was on his way in for the third.
“The parents were crying, ‘There’s still another one in there,’” Tavella said. “I chose to go to the right and that happened to be the room where the child was.”
Battalion 41 Chief Barry Brandes said he met the mother of two of the girls at the hospital.
“She was very grateful,” he said. “She kept thanking us over and over.” Both Buckheit and Tavella are fathers from Staten Island with 12 years of experience in the FDNY.
Before they came to the rescue, neighbor Rafael Dale, 73, a retired construction worker, tried to save the girls, but he was beaten back by the thick smoke, he said.
“I was in my boxers and the parents were screaming ‘my kids are inside,’” he said. With a jacket over his head for protection, he crawled into the apartment. “I made it six feet inside,” he said. “I turned back. I couldn’t make it. The smoke came in my face.”
To Tavella, uncomfortable being the center of attention, the cameras that crowded around him at the news conference were more of an obstacle than the fire.
“This was harder than that,” he said.
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