BLOOMSBURG — A Bloomsburg University student from Sunbury was among four firefighters who pulled a man from a burning downtown building Sunday morning.
Mitchell Lehman, who is a senior studying criminal justice, said he and the three other Bloomsburg firefighters searched the second floor of the building, found no one and went up to the third floor, where they were engulfed in smoke.
“It was pitch black, it was that heavy,” he said. “The walls were boiling.”
The men began forcing their way into apartments, beginning with the first. Most doors were locked.
“We could actually hear a guy yelling inside,” Lehman recalled. “When we were hitting the door, we could hear him saying, ‘who’s there?’ ;”
The men were able to get the door open and found the man standing in the living room. Lehman said he didn’t seem to know what was going on.
“We went in, I grabbed him and said ‘we need to go now,’;” he said. “He told me no, that he needed to get a jacket. He refused a little.”
The firefighters got the man outside using a fire exit, and he still was disoriented even in the fresh air, Lehman said. The man was taken into the care of medical workers, and the firefighters went back in the building to make sure no one else was inside. The rest of the building was vacant, however.
“It seems like it’s taking forever when you’re actually doing it, but it was quite quick. That’s why seconds count,” Lehman said. “In another minute, he might not have been conscious. It’s good we got there when we did. We did what we had to do.”
Lehman, a 21-year-old Sunbury native, grew up around the fire company, he said. He began at 14 with the East Sunbury Hose Company and continued with the Bloomsburg Fire Department once he began school at the university.
“We were calm when we went in,” he said. “It’s something we’ve always trained to do.”
After spending 13 hours on the scene fighting the fire, Lehman called his parents to let them know of his heroic day.
“My mom was a little ecstatic. She’s always been my biggest supporter. ... My dad was quite excited too,” he said.
“In the fire service, you never know what’s going to happen,” he said. “You’re thrown into it, and the most important thing is training. To me, it’s what we train to do.”
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