LYNN — When firefighters Andrew Luque, Chris Oram, and Robert Miele arrived at a recent fire on Hanover Street, there was a person sticking their head out of the window of the room that was on fire.
“I went up and pulled him out and onto my shoulder and out of the window,” Luque said.
It was a mattress fire, he said. The first report came in on June 23 around 5:50 p.m. and was followed by multiple calls regarding the fire.
“We knew we had to get there quick,” Luque said.
The three firefighters were first to arrive on-scene in Engine 3, taking around two minutes to get there. Then Luque saved the first-floor victim.
“At first I thought I needed help because it was high and I’m pretty short, but it ended up working out where I pulled his arms and got him up onto the actual windowsill in about a minute,” Luque said.
But this heroic save would not have happened if it weren’t for Oram, who was driving Engine 3. By making a split-second decision to take a different route to get to the fire, they arrived about two minutes before anyone else.
“I can commend the crews for their quick action,” Fire Chief Dan Sullivan said. “So when we show up on-scene, you know life safety is always our number one priority, so the crews accomplished that in a couple of different ways.”
He said that they identified the victim in the window and used the hose line, which Miele was in charge of, to keep the smoke and heat away from the victim while they were removing him.
“Then our ladder crew made entry with another engine with a hose line to extinguish the fire and check to make sure that there were no other people in the apartment,” he said.
The coordination of engines and ladders was all done by District Fire Chief Robert McIntosh, Sullivan added.
According to reports, the fire was knocked down by 6:07 p.m. The room that the fire started in sustained a lot of damage, Luque said.
If they had taken an alternative route, or if the resident hadn’t stuck his head out the window, that day could’ve ended differently.
“We all did our jobs the way we were supposed to,” Luque said.
