By Jillian Delaney
Staten Island Advance
NEW YORK — A New York City Fire Department deputy chief is being hailed as a hero after his quick actions helped save a man from a burning car.
George Healy and his family were on Brooklyn’s Belt Parkway en route on an 18-hour care ride to Disney World when traffic abruptly stopped on Monday, a post to the FDNY’s Facebook page detailed.
It was shortly after that Healy saw a car accident caused the delay — and that there was a fire.
“I recognized that it seemed like there was a fire involved, so I jumped out of the car and start running up the highway and saw a fairly significant accident. There were two cars involved and debris across the entire highway. The engine compartment of one car was on fire. I went over to that car, the passenger door was caved in and no longer openable, and the fire was spreading up the windshield. I pushed the airbag away and I realized in there was a man unconscious in the back seat,” Healy explained.
This was when a police officer came over to the car to help Healy.
“A police officer approached the driver’s side and smashed out the driver’s window. Together we were able to reach in and open the door. I got into the back seat and the man was entangled in the seat belt. He was limp. As I’m trying to disentangle him from the seat belt, the car is starting to fill with smoke from the fire. The fire in the engine compartment was starting to overtake the vehicle and the situation was rapidly deteriorating. If I didn’t remove him in fairly short order, the fire was going to overwhelm the car,” Healy said. “With the assistance of the police officer, we were able to pull him from the backseat and out of the car.”
A 34-year veteran of the FDNY , Healy “knew there was no one there and if we didn’t do something about this, the person wasn’t going to get out.”
Thanks to his quick thinking, the help of the police officer, and two FNDY paramedics — Abigail Poit and Jill Eby — the victim arrived at Brooklyn’s NYU Langone Hospital “in stable condition.”
Healy’s heroism did not go unnoticed by other drivers in the vicinity of the gridlock: ""When I went back to my car, a couple of other drivers approached me and said ‘Man, you ran into that, what’s wrong with you?’ and I’m like, ‘I’m a New York City firefighter; that’s what New York City firefighters do.’”
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