Chief Leader – June 09, 2015
by SARAH DORSEY
Chelsea Barnett doesn’t even live in New York; she was in town for just one night on Aug. 18, 2014, to see a concert with her old college roommate. After the show, they fell asleep in a first-floor East Village apartment, in a front bedroom whose windows were covered by bars.
Shortly before 8 a.m., a fire broke out in the living room, leaving them trapped and unable to determine, through the noise and confusion of the fire, whether help had arrived.
‘Everything Went Black’
“We didn’t really know; we couldn’t hear anything,” Ms. Barnett said last week. “And then everything kind of went black, so…”
The terror of those minutes when she was trapped dissolved as Ms. Barnett passed out from smoke inhalation. But unbeknownst to her, firefighters were crawling toward her and her friend—even though a hose-line stretched by their comrades hadn’t yet reached the fire to tame it.
Probationary Firefighter Marlon Q. Sahai was one of those three rescuers, and he stood next to Ms. Barnett June 3 in front of City Hall as he received the Probationary Firefighter Thomas A. Wylie Medal for bravery at the FDNY’s Annual Medal Day.
Mr. Sahai had responded to several fires since he graduated from the Academy the previous year. But as Ladder Co. 9 pulled up to the apartment, they’d received multiple calls with reports of victims trapped—a first for the rookie. Heavy smoke was pouring out through the bars on the front windows.
Lieut. Michael J. DeMeo—who received the Albert S. Johnston Medal for rescuing Ms. Barnett’s friend—led his company members toward the rear of the building and ordered them to keep the apartment door closed, waiting before ventilating the fire. He couldn’t risk feeding it further, and possibly spreading it over the trapped victims. He began crawling toward the flames, ordering Firefighter John Rocchio to man the door and Firefighter Sahai to hold the flames back as best as he could with his extinguisher. The officer had to pass the fire to conduct his search, knowing that if it gained much strength, he, too, would be trapped behind the barred windows.
The Lieutenant discovered Ms. Barnett’s friend and, joined by Firefighter Rocchio, brought her back through the raging fire.
The smoke was so heavy in the bedroom at that point that all that was visible of Ms. Barnett was a vague shape, barely recognizable as a person. Firefighter Sahai, who had joined his comrades in the bedroom, was able to make it out in the dark.
“I kind of saw, like, pink, and then I realized that was her pajamas,” Mr. Sahai recalled. He described the incoherence of the moment, in which his eyes alone couldn’t make the call: “So I saw legs, so I grabbed her legs, and I’m like…oh, okay, those are definitely legs.”
When he pulled Ms. Barnett’s face up close to his own, he saw in an instant how urgent the matter was.
‘Eyes Were Rolled Back’
“I wasn’t sure what her condition was, I just knew her face was beet red, her eyes were rolled back, it didn’t look good,” he said. The Firefighter shielded the victim’s body from the flames as he exited through the living room.
By the time Ms. Barnett awoke, she was in an intensive care unit, having been in a medically-induced coma for more than two weeks. Firefighter Sahai came to visit her, and in her drugged state, she handed him a teddy bear dressed as a firefighter, which he dutifully signed for her. Her mother, Boston pediatrician Karen Barnett, had visited the firehouse and extended a tearful hug to the Firefighter, showering him with gratitude, though she didn’t yet know if her daughter would pull through. The two families have kept in touch, and their extended families met for the first time on Medal Day.
“It is [still with me],” Ms. Barnett said of her experience, expressing gratitude toward Firefighter Sahai. “But it’s also something that’s a blessing in disguise, as terrible as that is.” She learned to stop fretting over the little things.
Grant Takes Top Honor
Such stories abound on Medal Day, when the bravest of the Bravest are honored—71 in total this year. The recipients included Capt. William J. Grant, who won the highest firefighting honor, the James Gordon Bennett Medal. He awoke in his Staten Island home on July 7, 2014 to screams from his wife—an explosion had just blown through his next-door neighbor’s house.
Captain Grant ran downstairs and kicked in the 60-year-old woman’s front door, beginning to crawl toward the rear before he was pushed back by the heat and smoke. He and his son, an off-duty NYPD officer, retrieved a ladder from a neighbor’s yard and he climbed to the second-floor window, where despite thick black smoke and blistering heat, he was able to find the semi-conscious woman on the bed and drag her onto the roof. He began carrying her down the ladder—a flimsy aluminum one, which broke when they were about six feet from the ground.
With 28 years on the job, Captain Grant had been to countless fires, but this one was distinct.
“It’s a big difference without bunker gear and a mask on,” he said in an interview after the medal ceremony. That equipment, he explained, “gives you the confidence [to go in]. But in my opinion, we didn’t have whatever it takes the Fire Department—four or five minutes?—to wait; she would have passed.”
EMTs Helped Save Cop
Emergency Medical Technicians Khadijah Hall and Shaun Alexander of EMS Station 58 earned the highest Emergency Medical Service award, the Christopher J. Prescott Medal, for their fast action tending to Police Officer James Li after he was shot by a fare-beater in Crown Heights, Brooklyn on Feb. 26, 2014.
They were off-duty, sitting in EMT Hall’s car discussing an upcoming retirement party for colleagues, when they witnessed the gunfight that left Officer Li shot in both legs. They grabbed an aid kit from the trunk and ran to the officer, beginning to treat him though they didn’t know if more shots were coming.
“When is help gonna come?” Officer Li said was his first thought when he was lying in the street, wounded. “And then they were right there!”
If they hadn’t arrived so quickly, “I don’t know what would’ve happen[ed],” he said. “Bad, very bad.”
Saved a Baby
Firefighter Jordan Sullivan was also honored for his rescue of an unconscious infant from a Boerum Hill, Brooklyn fire—the very first he’d ever fought as a probationary Firefighter, on March 16, 2014.
“I was really worried about masking up quick, and once that occurred, it became kind of like second nature—just the training took over and I just performed,” he said, also crediting senior members of Ladder Co. 105 for directing him well.
Masking up meant correctly donning his supplementary air supply.
A Flood of Adrenaline
“If it’s not on right, you could become part of the problem,” he explained. Once he saw to that, with adrenaline flooding through him, Firefighter Sullivan said, “Not really too much time to think, just time to act.”
The ceremony, held outside in front of City Hall for the first time in several years, drew hundreds of family members and colleagues. Mayor de Blasio recounted the feats performed by several members, including Manhattan’s Rescue 1 squad. Members of that company saved a woman’s life at the March 2014 East Harlem building collapse; they also rescued two window-washers dangling 68 stories up outside 1 World Trade Center that November.
‘Courage Binds Them’
“[The recipients] all have one profoundly important thing in common, which is courage,” Mr. de Blasio said. “Courage in risking their lives to save others. Something I always say, not every human being is built this way.”
Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro praised the three probationary Firefighters who received medals, including Mr. Sahai, Mr. Sullivan, and Ladder Co. 107’s Justin L. Tallett, who rescued an unconscious child from a Brooklyn apartment fire on July 29, 2014. He crawled through searing heat without the protection of a hose line, protecting the small figure from the flames on the way back out.
Commissioner Nigro also cited the courage of the EMS responders who, last October, treated Dr. Craig Spencer, the city’s first Ebola patient.
“Their skill, dedication and medical expertise are a large part of why the disease did not spread further and why their patient is still alive today,” he said.
Ladder 157 Cited
Ladder Co. 157 was awarded the World Trade Center Memorial Medal—the highest company medal—for saving several trapped victims from a Flatbush Ave., Brooklyn dwelling fire on Nov. 19, 2014. Engine Co. 201 received the Lieut. James Curran/New York Firefighters’ Burn Center Foundation/Father Julian F. Deeken Memorial Medal, which is awarded every three years to the most-impressive recipient of the World Trade Center Medal, for a March 2011 fire in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, at which they rescued 31 people.
Firefighter Kevin J. Hogan was awarded the Dr. Harry M. Archer Medal, given to the strongest William Gordon Bennett award recipient of the last three years. At that same Sunset Park fire, he passed the flames five times and personally saved seven lives, while assisting with several of the others.
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