It was daytime, but a St. Paul house was so full of smoke that it was impossible for firefighter Jeff Black to see. He was the first inside, and after a few steps, he fell into a hole the basement fire had burned in the floor above.lack held on, dangling above the basement and into the fire below."At first, I thought the floor was going to cave in - I didn't know because I couldn't see anything," he recalled Thursday. "Right after that, the flames came up from the basement all around me."He was burned while fellow firefighters held onto him.
The feeling for Black?"Absolute, sheer terror," he said. "Basically, if this keeps going, I was going to die. I figured I was going to burn to death at that point in the game."Black, who needed a skin graft for the worst burn on his leg, returned to work last Sunday. He's been recovering since the Jan. 2 fire in the 1400 block of St. Albans Street.The people who lived at the home weren't there when a neighbor spotted smoke and called 911 about 8:10 a.m. From down the block, the crew of Engine 18 could see "a huge, tremendous amount of smoke, so we knew we had a working fire," said Kevin Lagos, the engine's fire equipment operator and a paramedic.Deep Down Issued Patent For Loose Tube Flying Lead Assembly.
When Black got inside, "the floor felt really slippery, and the house was totally blacked out with smoke," he said.Firefighter Ian Nash, another member of Engine 18's four-person crew, said he "kind of briefly lost" Black in the smoke. "I crawled to him and I could hear the floor start to crackle and then the next thing I knew, Jeff was screaming for some help. A huge ball of fire went around him. I kind of dove for him and the hose line at the same time." As he fell, Black said, he spun himself around and threw his arms out, catching himself before he plunged into the basement. He ended up with his right leg above the floor, the other leg below the floor and his arms on either side of the 4-foot-wide hole.
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