Woman carried down 6 flights to safety in N. End condo fire
Rescuer: We don’t have time to play ... we need to get her down
A veteran city worker switched roles from ticketing cars to leading a rescue yesterday, helping to carry a woman down six flights of stairs after her North End condo building caught fire.
“I was very glad when we figured out what we had that (the other) guys were with me,” said Jay Richards, a 19-year veteran of the city’s Transportation Department.
Richards, an assistant parking enforcement supervisor, said he was knocking on doors in the North End yesterday and telling people to move their cars for the St. Agrippina di Mineo feast later that evening when a feast organizer started shouting that a building was on fire.
Richards ran down Battery Street and saw smoke pouring off the roof of the six-story Burroughs Wharf condo building on the waterfront.
Firefighters later determined the cause of the two-alarm fire was spontaneous combustion of an adhesive left on the roof of the building.
Richards began going through the building “banging on doors,” joined by building maintenance staff and firefighters from the Harbor Unit, which operates out of the building. And in a sixth-story unit, they found a woman and her caregiver still inside.
The woman had difficulty moving — and to make matters worse — was in a loft bed that amounted to an additional seventh story. Richards and his companions tried to move her to a mechanical chair lift, but the threat of smoke stopped that plan.
“They had the balcony door open and you could see the smoke, there was a strong, strong odor,” Richards said. “I said, ‘We don’t have time to play with that, we need to get her down.’ ”
So Richards and the firefighter strapped the woman to another chair and carried her down a seemingly endless flight of stairs.
“One of the guys helping me said, ‘ Which floor are we on?’ and I said, ‘The fourth,’ and he said ‘You’re kidding me! It feels like we just went down four flights!’” Richards recalled, laughing.
The men safely brought the woman to a lobby across the way, but Richards was the person who wound up needing medical treatment: He was taken to Massachusetts General after his asthma acted up, he said.
Richards’ rescue efforts were not the first time his job has led him into danger. He says he and another parking enforcement officer helped foil a mugging by Boston Common several years ago.
“There’s a lot of excitement you can fall into here,” Richards said.