“When I handed down the cat, she went out like Superman,” said firefighter Dino Ferraro (pictured). A six-foot-tall woman had leapt out of the burning building, head-first down a ladder, and grabbed onto his waist.
Ferraro, a 22-year veteran of the city fire department, had one of the most dramatic nights of his career at a Fair Haven home. When flames swept through a Fillmore Street home, his team’s swift response saved a woman’s life.
Ferraro, an energetic 49-year-old, told the tale with sweeping gestures, a few borrowed props and an impromptu chalk diagram in the Lombard Avenue firehouse Monday afternoon.
He was at the firehouse at 1 a.m. Friday when a call came in of a fire at 178 Fillmore. Luckily, the home was practically spitting distance away— just around the corner from the station. He and his buddies in Truck No. 3 zipped to the scene in under 10 seconds, he reckoned.
When they got there, the front of the three-story home was already shooting out smoke and flames.
“It looks like red curtains,” said Ferraro, who lives in North Haven. A woman in front of the house told them her mother was trapped on the third floor.
“We could hear a lot of screaming,” he recalled. Engine 10 set up hoses on the front side of the house, while Ferraro and his team at ladder Truck No. 3, led by battalion chief Captain Bob Gilhuly, followed the sound of her voice around back.
“Help me! My baby!” she cried, according to Ferraro. Her voice echoed through the neighborhood.
When they got to the rear yard, they saw the woman hanging out of a third-story window. She was wearing a nightgown. Smoke poured out the window around her. She was clutching something in her arms.
“We thought she had a baby with her,” Ferraro said.
Another firefighter, Ron Dematteis, ran up the rear stairs and found a third-floor staircase blocked. It was blocked by a book case. The window would be her only way out.
Gilhuly called for a 35-foot ladder to be propped against the house. They found out the “baby” turned out to be a cat.
Ferraro climbed up the ladder. At the top, he reached out to rescue her — only to have her refuse.
“She wouldn’t come out of the building until I took the cat,” said Ferraro. Even with the flames burning behind her, she wouldn’t be convinced to save herself first. So Ferraro took the cat from her arms.
“What did it look like? It was curled up in a ball, probably shitting its pants, like the rest of us,” Ferraro said. The gray-coated animal dug its claws in his uniform as he carried it down the ladder.
Superman Catch
Ferraro handed the cat off to a fellow firefighter half-way down the ladder. Then began the second rescue. The rescue started a bit early.
“Once she gave me that cat, she was ejected, like a button,” the firefighter recalled. “She went out like Superman:” She leapt out of the window, headed head-first down the ladder, and grabbed onto Ferraro’s waist.
Bearing the weight of the six-foot-tall woman, who was 46 years old, Ferraro tried to calm her and get her down the ladder as quickly possible.
“Just don’t move,” he told her. To himself, he was thinking, “If she moved left or right, if she moves one foot off,” both of them would fall.
Ferraro had a bad experience while teetering on a ladder during a rescue once before: It was 1989, at the New Haven Clock Company factory on Hamilton Street. He was atop an aerial ladder, four stories high, when a stream of water hit the ladder and twisted it. The ladder collapsed from under him. He hung on for two stories, then fell to the ground, separating his shoulder.
“That’s another story,” said Ferraro, preferring to move on from what had happened nearly 20 years ago. This time, he was happy to report, the elements blew in his favor.
“Just ride it out,” he told the woman, headed face-first down the ladder. He backed down the ladder, talking to her the whole way to calm her nerves. It all went smoothly.
“She came out so quick,” said Ferraro with relief.
At the bottom, paramedics gave her an oxygen mask and sent her to Yale-New Haven Hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation, said Gilhuly (pictured).
Ferraro said the situation could have turned out much worse. “If Captain Gilhuly didn’t call a 35,” said Ferraro, referring to a rescue by a 35-foot-ladder, “she’s coming out the door in a body bag.”
The leaper and her daughter, who lives on the second floor with a husband and son, were displaced by the fire and have been housed with friends or relatives, officials said. Firefighters smashed down the first-floor door to see if anyone was inside. No one was in there. Engine 10 had the fire out in about 20 minutes, Gilhuly reckoned.
Gilhuly commended Ferraro and the crew at Truck 3, including Scott Longyear, Lt. Ralph Peccorillo and Dematteis, for a job well done. “Everything went great.”
Another great job by the NHFD