One Teen's Quick Thinking and a Trampoline Save Residents Trapped in Burning Building
A 17-year-old in Bentleyville, Pennsylvania, helped rescue his neighbors after a fire broke out Tuesday morning at his apartment building.
The incident occurred just before 1 a.m., according to WPXI-TV.
Multiple residents were trapped in the building after the fire broke out, the Bentleyville Fire-Rescue said, according to Fox News.
The 17-year-old, Falon O’Regan, was one of the apartment building’s first residents to make it out of the burning building by jumping out of the window.
“I opened the [front] door … and I was flabbergasted,’ O’Regan told the Daily Mail as he recounted his first moments of learning that there was a fire in the apartment complex.
“I stared at it for a couple of seconds, closed it, grabbed the stuff that I could, broke a door, broke a window, and I jumped,” he said.
O’Regan grabbed his birth certificate, wallet and phone and left a window open for his four cats as he hurried to help others.
Seeing other people still stuck in the burning structure who needed rescuing, O’Regan quickly sprang into action so that no one would be left behind.
“I thought about the kids and what I would do if I was younger,” he said. “I just thought I’d panic, so I just had to do this.”
So O’Regan teamed with a neighbor to help find a way the others could jump out safely. Their solution? A trampoline.
“Me and Robert, my neighbor downstairs, had to move the trampoline from the side of the house to the three bedrooms on the last part of the house because they would’ve gotten hurt if we didn’t,” O’Regan said, according to WPXI.
Residents were reluctant to jump out of the window, but it seemed as if there was no other way out of the inferno.
“You look out the window and the fire’s starting through your doorway and you literally have fire coming at you and you have to jump,” resident Michael Groots said, according to WCAU-TV. “You have to jump. There’s no other option.”
“I had to talk them into jumping,” O’Regan recalled, per the Daily Mail.
Two adults, two dogs and two children jumped to safety using the trampoline, the outlet reported.
“They prevented a lot of injuries,” Tim Miller, an assistant fire chief of Bentleyville Fire-Rescue, told WCAU.
One person suffered a leg injury, and three others had to be treated at the hospital for smoke inhalation, WPXI reported.
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