CHARLOTTE, N.C. — As firefighter Chris McMillan made his way through the third floor of the burning building, he could see and hear two people trapped. They were about 50 feet up, three floors above him, and another hundred feet away.
The five-alarm fire had already engulfed much of the structure. It was an apartment building under construction in Charlotte’s South Park area, with two stories of concrete and more stories of exposed wood on top of that.
More than 90 firefighters responded to the massive blaze that started before 9 a.m. May 18. On Thursday, a week since the fire, Charlotte Fire Department officials said they still don’t know exactly what sparked the flames, but it started near a foam insulation truck.
Firefighters rescued 15 workers that day, including a crane operator trapped high above the flames. Two workers died in the fire, Demonte Sherrill and Ruben Holmes.
“By the grace of God, we rescued who we could,” McMillan said. The two who perished were too far away for him to rescue, McMillan said, and he could feel the fire getting hotter below him, the smoke getting thicker.
“When I got up to the third floor, I spotted the victims and could hear the screams,” McMillan said, speaking to reporters Thursday. But they were trapped on the sixth floor.
As the second floor became engulfed in the flames, McMillan said he knew it was time to rescue himself. He jumped on the ladder and slid fast down the three stories and away from the flames. Another firefighter caught him as he hit the bottom of the ladder, he said.
“Twenty-eight years on the job and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Charlotte Fire Capt. Jeff Bright. He leads the squad that rescued the crane operator trapped high above the fire.
“Things changed very rapidly, a lot faster than I’ve ever seen in my career,” he said.
Bright said he stayed on the radio with that crane operator for 35 minutes before firefighters could get him down.
“To talk to him on the radio and hear him say he’s down to his last bottle of water,” Bright said, his voice breaking as he spoke with reporters Thursday. “We will do anything in our power to save anyone.”
Bright and firefighter Kevin Murphy described how the rescue operation worked. The ladder up to the crane was too small for a firefighter to bring the normal air tank, so they had to position air along the way as a heavy column of smoke clouded the air above.
The firefighters kept pouring water on the crane to keep the steel cool, worried that the metal could buckle and the crane would collapse.
Earlier, the crane operator had moved the basket on the crane down onto the top of the burning building in hopes of helping save some of the trapped workers. But now it was time to save him.
They thought about bringing in a helicopter, but the fire was too hot and there was too much smoke.
“Capt. Bright said, ‘Murphy, it’s time to climb,” the firefighter said. He brought protective gear with him to help get the operator down safely.
Bright said the crane operator was ready and said he “came down like a cat.”
Murphy said it took him three minutes to climb up to the top of the crane and 90 seconds to get back down, according to Bright.
“We train for these contingencies every day,” Battalion Chief Shane Nantz said. “This is what we call ‘the big one.’”
