crashes, cats, fires: In a day’s work

It was Election Day and Fire Company 74’s Capt. Ciro Napolitano was off-duty, traveling north on I-95 through Georgia. He was on his way back from Disney World with his wife, where they had just celebrated their 31st wedding anniversary.

“My wife was driving. We had just swapped; we take turns,” said Napolitano. “And she says to me ‘Oh my god, look at all the smoke up ahead!’ There was this plume of smoke.”

A maroon Ford SUV Explorer had lost control on the road. “It literally rolled over five or six times — hit the guardrail, bounced off and caught fire,” explained Napolitano. With the exception of a couple of police cars that had just begun rolling up, first responders had yet to arrive on the scene.

Clad in Nantucket red shorts and a royal blue Mickey Mouse T-shirt, Napolitano sprang into action. “I could see the guy in the car and it was filling up with smoke, so I ran back to my car. I usually keep a bunch of tools in there, but being that we had all of our luggage, I only had a crowbar and my fire department gloves. So I grabbed my crowbar, ran back to the car, tried to force the door open, I got it about a quarter of the way open but couldn’t break the pin.”

He dropped the crowbar and went around to the passenger side of the vehicle and got in. “That’s when I saw how bad the guy was .... there was blood everywhere,” Napolitano said.

The car then filled up with smoke. “I couldn’t see nothing anymore,” he recalled.

Blinded, Napolitano still managed to unclip the driver’s seat belt, raise the steering wheel, and drop the seat back enough to begin pulling the driver out of the car. Going back and forth between the passenger and driver windows, he worked to unpin the driver’s knees, and eventually his foot, which was jammed underneath the gas pedal. “I was finally able to get his foot out, and there were other people standing outside the car, and I just yelled at them: ‘OK, pull his arms out, pull him out, pull him out!’ and we finally got him out to the roadway. That’s when the fire department was just starting to pull up,” Napolitano said.

He helped the local firefighters force the car open and put out the fire, and then went back on his way: northbound.

From Engine Company 74 on West 83rd Street, Napolitano and his team (and their Dalmatian, Yogi) work day and night to keep Westsiders safe. “Day to day? Roll the dice,” he said. “There’s always something interesting going on, whether it’s water rescues off the pier over here at 79th street, or car fires and accidents on the West Side Highway ... believe it or not, we still get calls for cats in trees. I had one right around the block a few years ago.”