The scene of the July 2 fire (above) and Firefighter David Cassidy giving the thumbs up as he is taken from the scene to the hospital (below). (Photo by Brian Donohue. Click to enlarge.)
By BRIAN DONOHUE
As Red Bank volunteer firefighters battled a blaze in an attached town home on Ambassador Drive the night of July 2, the scene was replete with layers of human drama that neighborhood emergencies can imprint into our brains forever.
The sounds of shattering windowpanes and shouts of firefighters. The distraught four residents of the home, their lives suddenly upended, looking on from across the street. The neighbor who lives in the unit adjoining the burning condo fretting over whether she’ll have to evacuate her 90-plus year old mother.
Firefighter David Cassidy giving the thumbs up as he is taken from the scene to the hospital (Photo by Brian Donohue. Click to enlarge.)
And amid it all a firefighter in full gear walked from the burning building, reached the street and fell to his knees.
Fellow volunteers and EMT’s quickly surrounded him, removed his gear, doused him with water to cool him down. Minutes later, he was wheeled off to an ambulance, giving a thumbs up to his fellow firefighters from the stretcher and assuring them, “I’m okay.”
At the meeting of the Mayor and Borough Council last week, Council member David Cassidy said he had decided to reveal the identity of the yet-unnamed firefighter.
“That was me,’’ he said. “I was that firefighter.”
Cassidy used the speaking time allotted for each council member to tell the story of his ordeal. His intent, he said, was to underscore the sacrifices made by first responders – and to thank those who helped him when he needed it.
“After 16 years of service, I was the person on the scene that needed aid,” he said. “And I wanted my friends and my neighbors to know what our first responders – paid and volunteer – go through.”
Firefighters arrived on the scene to find heavy smoke and flames emanating from the basement and moving to the ground floor of the home.
Cassidy ascended the stairs and realized he might faint. A statistic jumped into his head: the leading cause of death among firefighters on emergency scenes is cardiac arrest.
“In that situation the worst thing you can do is push through,” he said. “You don’t want to make a bad situation worse, put other people in danger. And I tapped out. I reported to the incident commander and went straight to the EMTs.”
“The EMTs told me they watched the color come back to my face,’’ he said.
Cassidy described his first hand view, from the stretcher and his hospital bed, of the small moments behind the word “community.”
The EMT in the ambulance made comforting small talk about a Tesla Cybertruck they had both seen on the streets of Red Bank. Others loaned him their cell phones so he could try and call his wife. Two fire chiefs visited him in the hospital, and a shared bond with a nurse who serves as a volunteer firefighter in Fair Haven.
Cassidy was given fluids, an EKG, and other tests and released in the early morning hours of July 3 with a diagnosis of heat stroke.
He lamented being unable to resuscitate the fire victims’ pet cat, which died in the blaze. He was happy to learn firefighters had managed to keep the fire from spreading to other units in the complex.
“It was a great stop by this fire department and our neighboring departments that came to our aid.” “We did so much on that scene,” he said. “I’m just so proud of this community.”
His name had been with withheld in previous reporting by redbankgreen on the request of the Red Bank Fire Department and privacy concerns. But Cassidy thought it was worth ditching the anonymity, deeming his own story worth telling from his platform on the borough council dais.
“Most of all it’s just that sense of gratitude and that sense of community that comes with being a volunteer and a first responder in a town and just having an opportunity to see people in your moment of need come to your aid, just as you keep coming to theirs,” he said.
“Sixteen years I’ve watched that happen to other people and to get to kind of see it from the other side, it just shows you the system works and it just works that people take care of each other. And I just wanted to say thank you.”
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