By Peter Cox, C.J. Sullivan and Ed Robinson
New York Post

NEW YORK — A firefighter was seriously injured when he fell two stories out of a ladder bucket while fighting a blaze in The Bronx yesterday.

Brian Smith, 43, an 11-year FDNY veteran assigned to Ladder 44, had been inside the bucket, which was raised outside an apartment window on Shakespeare Avenue in Highbridge, at 4:19 p.m.

Smith suddenly tumbled out the side of the bucket.

"He was breaking the window and he fell," said witness John Zorilla. "It was just a whole big commotion. He fell head first and his helmet fell off."

Darnell Sanabria, 21, who lives across the street, said the firefighter "didn't move. He was just still."

Smith was rushed to St. Barnabas Hospital in serious, but stable, condition.

"He's a very lucky man," said Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, who visited Smith at the hospital.

Scoppetta said Smith was "in a great deal of pain," but "was lucid and alert."

The injured firefighter suffered fractured ribs, and doctors were running tests to determine the extent of other injuries, the commissioner said.

It was not immediately clear whether the bucket doors were open or what else caused Smith to fall. Scoppetta promised an investigation. The cause of the fire was also being probed.

Neighbors said the blaze started when a woman who lives on the second floor of the six-story apartment building left a candle burning.

Smith, who's married with two children, was part of a team that rescued a 3-year-old girl and a 26-year-old man from a burning building in Morrisania in February of 2002.

They were trapped behind a locked door, which the firefighters had to take off its hinges.

Yesterday's fall was reminiscent of a June tragedy in which firefighter Daniel Pujdak, 23, slipped from a ladder and fell 50 feet to his death while battling a blaze in Brooklyn.

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