The Oregonian
WILSONVILLE, Ore. — Firefighter Chris Mills had been driving for about five minutes on his way to work at Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue early Thursday when he decided to make a U-turn and head back toward his Wilsonville home.
Mills had gotten an alert on his cellphone through an app that signals someone nearby is in medical distress. In this case, it was a burning home in the .
“I was about a mile or a mile and a half away from my house, so I decided that I might as well double back and check it out,” said Mills, 42.
By the time he pulled near the single-story house about 6 a.m., flames were shooting through the roof, smoke was pouring outside and a young woman and a neighbor that Mills recognized were standing near the burning home.
The young woman lived in the home and said she believed her mom was still inside.
When she noticed the fire, she yelled to her mother to leave and escaped through a bedroom window. She screamed for help once outside. There was still no sign of her mom.
When Mills arrived, she was able to give him a layout of the home. Her mother would likely be in her bedroom or the living room, she said.
Mills said he reacted so quickly that he doesn’t believe he ever mentioned to the daughter and the neighbor that he was a firefighter. He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.
“I’ve been doing this for so long that my instincts to help and training kick in automatically,” Mills said. “I didn’t even realize that I didn’t have my firefighting gear on until we got to the front door and were about to go in.”
The front door was closed, so Mills and the neighbor Jesse Keller, kicked it open. Smoke filled the living room, so Mills and Keller crawled in on their stomachs. About 4 feet from the door, they saw a woman face-down on the living room floor with her head toward them.
“The smoke was pretty thick,” Mills said. “If we didn’t see her, I’m not sure we would have gone inside.”
Keller grabbed the unconscious woman. Then Mills grabbed onto Keller and pulled.
The two men got the woman out of the house. Mills made sure she was still breathing and then called 911 for a helicopter to get her to a hospital. They used a piece of outdoor furniture as a makeshift stretcher to get the woman away from the home.
It took about 10 minutes for the first fire crew to arrive.
Mills believes with the amount of smoke in the home, the woman may not have survived if he and Keller hadn’t reached her when they did.
“I honestly wouldn’t recommend people doing what I did today,” he said. “It worked out so well because I’ve been doing this for 26 years. But someone with no experience rushing into a home could easily become another victim.”
It’s a good thing that he lives only about a quarter-mile away.
“I think this was a case of right people, right place, right time and right training,” Mills said.
About 70 firefighters, including from Tualatin Valley, Newberg and Dundee, responded to the two-alarm fire at the home, according to Piseth Pich, a Tualatin Valley Fire & Rescue spokesman. Four dogs, a cat, a parakeet and several ducks and geese also were rescued from the home, but two of the dogs died, Pich said.
The mother was flown to Legacy Emanuel Medical Center, Pich said, but he didn’t know her condition. The daughter was taken to a hospital as a precaution. Pich said he did not know their identities.
The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
Mills said helping people off-duty isn’t new for him. He has spotted crashes several times and stopped to help, he said.
“It’s nothing big,” Mills said. “I’d just like to think anyone else in my position would do the same thing.”
Mills said he was grateful Keller was on the scene with him.
“I don’t think either one of us would have been successful alone,” he said.
Copyright 2015 The Oregonian
All Rights Reserved