By John Collins
The Lowell Sun
LOWELL, Mass. — Thanks to a fast-acting 20-year-old Dracut man who used a garden hose to extinguish flames on the rear porch of a single-family home yesterday, an elderly couple is still able to live in their house.
“He did a great job of basically putting the fire out with the garden hose before we got here,” Deputy Fire Chief Patrick McCabe said at the scene.
The drama started about 2:30 p.m., as Joe Villanueva, 20, of Dracut was doing some landscaping work at the home of his girlfriend’s grandmother at 37 Beech St., in the Centralville section of Lowell. His girlfriend, Natashia Foote, 19, was driving him to a hardware store for supplies when Villanueva smelled smoke again. He had smelled it earlier, but this time, it was stronger.
They soon realized the smoke was coming from a house at 14 Beech St.
“As we got closer to the house, I saw it was on fire, so I jumped out of the car,” Villanueva said. “I broke their fence to get into the yard — I apologized for that to the owner later.”
At first, Villanueva struggled to find, then untangle, the garden hose, before using it to douse the flames, which had worked their way from the porch decking to the roof, he said.
“The porch, the whole side of the house, the roof — I put the whole fire out,” Villanueva said. “The people were happy because they said the house was old, and if I hadn’t done that before the firetrucks got there, it would’ve been gone.”
While Joe fought the fire outside the house, Natashia, who is six months pregnant, went in through the front door after a woman, exiting with a dog, shouted that her elderly husband was still inside.
“Luckily, the house wasn’t burning on the inside, but I didn’t know that going in,” said Natashia, who helped Richard McMahon get out. “I didn’t think about (the danger) until I came out. I got really shaky after.”
Because the flames were knocked down quickly, McCabe said, the damage was confined to the porch. Had it not been for Villanueva’s actions, he added, the 100-year-old structure likely would have been engulfed minutes later.
The McMahons and their German shepherd escaped the fire unharmed. They were allowed to re-enter the home as soon as firefighters had officially cleared the scene about 3:30 p.m., about an hour after the fire was first reported.
Villanueva was taken to Saints Medical Center by ambulance for treatment of smoke inhalation before McCabe or McMahon could thank him for his heroics.
“I wanted to give him a big smooch,” McMahon said.
The first-arriving ambulance crew didn’t give the soot-covered Villanueva a choice, he said. They strapped him to a gurney for the ride to Saints while checking him for smoke inhalation.
“I still smell like smoke, but it was worth it,” Villanueva told The Sun after he’d left the hospital and returned to Beech Street to check on the McMahons about two hours after the fire.
He said McMahon told him, “‘If you need anything, call me. I owe you.’ And I said to him, ‘You don’t owe me anything. I’m all set.’”
Villanueva, who is unemployed and resides in Dracut after having grown up in Lowell, attending Nashoba Tech, told The Sun the only reward he’d like to accept is a job offer — landscaping, construction, “anything that involves working outside with my hands,” he said — that could help him support his new family.
“I guess it was daring, but it was worth it to see the huge smiles on their faces, and see them go back into their house and not have to worry about where they’re going to live,” he said.
McCabe said the cause of the porch fire appeared to be “careless disposal of smoking materials.
“It appeared that someone was smoking out there earlier,” the deputy chief said.
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