On this run, we were in an abandoned house - well I shouldn’t say abandoned, but it was being renovated - and it was really full of smoke. Myself and the other Firefighter, John Brewer, went in and this time we did have masks on. We were crawling through there searching, because a lot of times even an empty house will have homeless people who go under the house and start a fire that gets out of control. You have to check for people to rescue and bodies in those situations. 

So we were crawling around and all of the sudden I heard this big thump, and then I heard John moaning. I couldn’t see because of the smoke, but I crawled in his direction trying to find him and almost fell into a big hole in the ground. It turned out that as part of the renovation, they had removed a part of the chimney that went from the floor down into the ground, and it was about seven or eight feet deep. John had fallen down in there, and he was all crunched in and couldn’t get out. He couldn’t breathe very easily either, because of his position. 

I had to feel my way around to figure out how to grab him, and finally got him out. That was a tender moment though, trying to rescue your fellow firefighter. If I wasn’t near enough to hear the thump and his cries for help through his mask, he could have been in there for a good hour and possibly died. So that was another close call.