Jimmy Lee climbed down a rope from the roof of the building. I just grabbed the rope, dumped the rope onto the roof and then that’s when Andy, Steve and Joe came up and we just went to work,” Lee recalled. “Frank called me and said we had a guy at the window. In this fire, it was the only option to save Duffy.įirefighter Jimmy Lee would be the one who scaled the burning building. The last time the FDNY relied on a rope rescue was in 2011. While it’s often practiced, it’s a technique rarely used by firefighters because of the danger it poses. The technique requires a firefighter to use a rope to rappel down to a victim. So the firefighters relied on what they called “a last ditch effort” – a rope rescue. We were in a tough spot,” said firefighter Frank Rush. My thought was possibly a fire escape, but there was no fire escape in this old building. There were no firetrucks back there, so that’s not going to work. “If we had gotten a 35-foot ladder to the rear (of the building), it wouldn’t have reached him because he was on the fifth floor. With the fire beginning to overtake his home, firefighters had just seconds to think about how to save him. That’s when a few of the firefighters heard the calls for help. Soon the order came over the scanner – everyone needed to evacuate the building because of the risk the fire posed to the firefighters’ lives. We’ve got fire on the fourth floor.’ You know you’re sitting there going – we thought we were coming here for a fire on the first floor, and it’s everywhere,” recalled firefighter Andy Hawkins. “It was almost comical when you listen on the radio that ‘We’ve got fire on the first floor.’ Okay, we can handle that. Even the responding firefighters couldn’t believe the enormity of what they were battling. More than 200 firefighters responded within minutes to the six-alarm fire that overtook the five-story building where Duffy lived. The blaze engulfed the five-story building.

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