An 80-year-old woman and several other terrified elderly residents were plucked to safety by hero firefighters battling a ferocious blaze that left dozens homeless in Brooklyn yesterday.
“Thank God I’m here,” said Carrie Agard, 80, after being rescued from her fiery, second-floor Crown Heights apartment building by a Bravest with a ladder.
“I was scared, but [the firefighter] said he was with me, and he kept me calm. You couldn’t see for all the black smoke. It was hard for me to breathe.
“I was glad he had me,” added the shaken woman, a retired postal worker who had lived in the four-story apartment building at 1440 Pacific St. for five decades. “He said, ‘Don’t worry – I’ll get you down,’ and he took me down the ladder.”
The blaze began at 4:38 a.m. on the second floor of the brick building and quickly spread up to the roof before it was brought under control at 8:08 a.m., according to an FDNY spokesman. The cause remains under investigation, he said.
“I woke up. I heard what I thought was water. I opened the door to go downstairs, and there was fire everywhere,” said Ruth Dunk, a 62-year-old resident of the building. “I pushed the door closed, and I locked it.”
A fireman on a ladder later rescued her.
Jeannette Cotten, 59, of North Carolina, who had been staying at her mother’s first-floor apartment in the building, said she was tending to her granddaughter Daja’s asthma attack when she smelled smoke.
“I went to the door and saw the smoke in the hallway, and there was fire all around the door, and it was hot,” Cotten said.
“I got everybody’s clothes on, and we went back to the fire escape. The firefighters got us out of there. It kind of shook me up a little bit.”
Her mother, 81-year-old Annie Johnson, had lived in the building for 60 years.
“She lost just about everything, except her life,” Cotten said.
“I’m blessed,” Johnson said, standing next to her daughter.
Despite the early hour, all 54 people who lived in the building miraculously escaped out into the frigid air, with only two being hospitalized with smoke inhalation. Seven of the 140 firefighters who responded to the blaze were injured, two of them with serious burns. They treated at the burn center at Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan.
“It was a serious fire. It was going pretty good,” said Kenny DiTata, 52, a 20-year FDNY veteran who was on a Ladder Co. 111 truck that responded to the call.
“We had people . . . hanging out the windows trying to get out because of the smoke.”
“I was in the [ladder truck’s] bucket, and I used it to take two people out of the third floor,” DiTata said.
“They were shaken up. They were scared. But they held on.”
The Red Cross said it placed 33 people from eight families in local hotels. The remaining residents had other places to stay.