The daring firefighter grabbed the woman hanging out the window around her waist, and another firefighter also hanging from the building helped lower them to colleagues by an open window of an apartment one floor below. “I’m like, ‘If they don’t grab her, that’s it.’”įirefighters lowered oxygen tanks and masks to the trapped residents, and one firefighter rappelled down the side of the building on a rope, the video shows. “I didn’t know how she was going to stay there,” he said. The women hung on for her life for five minutes, Gunsberger said. “(The tenants were) literally choking from smoke. “(There were) massive amounts of smoke coming out of a window,” Gunsberger said.

Her left arm was wrapped in a drape, said witness Ken Gunsberger. Video posted to Twitter showed a woman hanging from a window ledge of the apartment as the blaze raged inside. Two tenants unable to escape by the front door instead tried to go out a window. The fire broke out when a lithium-ion battery attached to an e-bike exploded by the front door of a 20th-floor apartment front door, said FDNY Chief Fire Marshall Daniel Flynn.

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