By Nancy Petersen
The Philadelphia Inquirer
PARKSIDE, Pa. — Volunteers with the Parkside Fire Company are trained not only to fight fires, but to rescue firefighters from other companies who are in trouble.
“If a firefighter goes down, it’s our job to get them out,” said Thomas Cubler, Parkside’s safety officer. “We never expected we would rescue our own people.”
Early Saturday morning, the unthinkable happened. During a Parkside Borough townhouse fire, the second floor collapsed onto two young members of the Delaware County company, trapping them under a pile of debris, furniture and rubble.
Second-generation firefighter Dan Brees, 20, was quickly pulled out.
But it took 15 desperate minutes to rescue Chase Frost, 21, a Widener University nursing student who has been with the company for four years.
“There’s no preparing anybody for the emotions we’re dealing with now,” Parkside Deputy Chief John Albany said yesterday. “You can read tons of articles but you can’t put the emotions to it until you experience something like this.”
Both men were listed in critical condition at the Crozer-Chester Medical Center last night. Brees has burns over 5 percent of his body along with respiratory problems. Frost suffered first- and second-degree burns over 50 percent of his body.
“Both of them are young, strong and fighting,” Albany said.
The Parkside station was staffed yesterday with volunteers from Havertown’s Bon Air Fire Co., one of many volunteer companies that have stepped up to let Parkside regroup after the accident.
They have come from Newtown Square, Springfield, Goshen and Concordville. Volunteers from West Chester First stayed through the night on Sunday. Brandywine 100, Prospect and Norwood were scheduled yesterday. And Lionville, from Chester County, is one of the companies that will cover today.
E-mails and calls of support have come from around the country, Albany said. Neighbors are stopping by with pizza, pastries, hoagies and casseroles.
“We’re trying to stay together” emotionally, he said. “We spend a lot of time together and our families have been very supportive.”
Firefighting is a tradition in the Brees family. Dan has been with the Parkside company for three years and his brother Jim is an assistant chief. Another brother, Michael, is a training officer for Parkside. Their father was a firefighter in Media, where Dan also volunteers.
In all the years they have have put in, this is the first time there has been an injury in the Brees family, Albany said.
In addition to attending Widener, where he is an Army ROTC student, Frost also works with the Eddystone and Norwood Fire Companies and the Marple Township Ambulance Corps. He has been a Parkside member since 2003.
Frost used to collect sirens when he was a teenager in Texas.
According to a 2000 story in USA Today, he was living near Fort Worth when two deadly tornadoes hit.
After hearing a siren in a nearby town, he turned on his TV and saw that a tornado warning had been issued.
Frost cranked up three of his sirens and warned neighbors within a quarter-mile radius to take cover.
“As close as we are to Chase, none of us knew that,” said Cubler, who learned of the anecdote in a local newspaper on Sunday.
After a rescue like Saturday’s “you’re living on adrenalin, and then it hits you,” Cubler said.
The 911 call came in at 2:07 a.m. Saturday from Geordi Grant, 13, who was just getting ready to go to bed. The fire was next door, on Park Vallei Lane in the Green Tree Village section of the small borough.
“I had my hand on the light switch and I smelled something like smoke,” Grant said. He woke up his mother and sister and got them out of the house, then yelled down the block to alert neighbors.
Townhouse owner Sam Kushto woke at 2 a.m. when his alarm went off, signaling that it was time to get up to go fishing. Instead, he jumped from his second floor window wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.
“We had the fire knocked down,” said Albany, who was the first on the scene. Frost and Brees “were just a few feet in the front door when the [second] floor collapsed [on top of them]. They brought Danny out through the rear door, but Chase was trapped underneath the contents of the second floor.”
Albany, who works full-time for the Chester City Fire Department, said he “held control” until Jim Brees arrived. “At that point, I felt that somebody fresh needed to take over,” he said.
The firewalls between the townhouse units kept the fire from spreading, Albany said. The cause of the blaze is still under investigation.
When Albany brought his crew back to the firehouse, members of the county’s incident crisis-management team were waiting.
They have been an almost constant, and welcome, presence in the firehouse since, he said.
“Every time we go out that door, we go out into the unknown,” Albany said. “Everytime the pager goes off, you don’t know... . That’s what we train for.”
Copyright 2007 Philadelphia Inquirer
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News