SILVER SPRING, Md. — A man is being hailed as a hero for his quick actions during a three-alarm fire at the Arrive Silver Spring apartment building Saturday morning.
Joe Tresh said he woke up at 6 a.m. to hear residents of a neighboring apartment apparently scrambling to put out a fire in their unit in the high-rise building at 8750 Georgia Ave.
Peering through his door’s peephole, he said he could see smoke beginning to build.
Tresh went to the hallway and directed his neighbors to a fire extinguisher before turning to go back in to alert his partner that they had to go.
“It went from light grey smoke to black smoke in the hallway in a matter of 20 seconds,” Tresh said.
At that point he said he’d lost track of his neighbors, who he believed were trying to fight the fire in their unit.
Tresh recalled leading his partner, David Mullis, out of the unit on hands and knees under a curtain of deadly smoke.
”I couldn't see in front of me until I got onto the ground and was crawling on hands and knees,” Tresh said. “I could not see above like a foot above me. So I had to get down very low and had to just crawl the entire way.”
Unable to find an alarm in the dense smoke, Tresh and Mullis got to the stairwell and ran down one level. No alarm was ringing yet.
That’s where Mullis said Tresh found an alarm on the sixth floor and pulled it.
It was the first time other residents in the building got any warning about the fire raging out of control on the seventh floor, according to other residents interviewed by WUSA9.
“He is a hero,” marveled seventh-floor neighbor Gianna Gronowski. “Without him, we probably would’ve slept through the fire until it was too late. We didn’t know him before this, but he saved our lives.”
“It was pure coincidence,” Tresh said. “I just happened to be awake and I’m generally pretty conscious about fire safety so I knew right where the fire extinguisher was.”
But Tresh said his focus quickly shifted to getting to the alarm.
“It was too much smoke to begin with. What we really needed to do was get to that fire alarm and I couldn't get to it on my floor,” he said
“Joe was the first guy to pull the alarm,” Mullis said. “Absolutely he's a hero. I wouldn't be here if he hadn't woken me up for that.”
Tresh and Mullis said after leaving the seventh floor, they don’t know what happened to the residents of the burning unit. The men reported they have not seen their neighbors since the fire.