CARLTON FLETCHER: Heroes respond to Albany fire

“I need a hero, I’m holdin’ out for a hero ‘til the morning light.”

— Bonnie Tyler

I was leaving a local restaurant Friday when I saw Dougherty County Coroner Michael Fowler sitting in a booth on the way out. I stopped by to say hello.

“I thought you’d be at the fire,” Fowler said. He told me of a blaze on Tift Avenue.

My wife and I were making a trip to Moultrie, but we rerouted and headed over to Tift. The fire that burned the house at 423 W. Tift Ave. to the ground was horrendous, and watching it play out before my eyes was way more gruesome than anything you see on “Chicago P.D.” This was a residence where real people lived.

Tara walked behind the house as firefighters continued to battle the blaze, and she encountered residents of the boarding house. She heard one say, “What are we gonna do? Our house has burned down.”

And, alas, Chatayunda Davis, 38, lost her life in the blaze, and another resident was transported to Phoebe.

I know the good folks with the Salvation Army and Red Cross help people like these suddenly homeless out in emergency situations, and I sincerely hope they offered aid to these people who lost everything they owned in a matter of minutes. As Assistant Albany Fire Department Chief Rubin Jordan said, “In a house like that, made of basically fat lighter, everything burned in a hurry.”

While I’ve wondered in the days since Friday about the people who lost their home and their belongings in that fire, I’ve also felt a swelling of pride for the firefighters who responded to the blaze. In addition to Jordan, Battalion Chief Sebon Burns and Chief Cedric Scott, 11 firetrucks were either at the scene of the fire on Third or battling separate blazes in the neighborhood after sparks, possibly, as Jordan said, blown by winds from Hurricane Ian, set grass and one tree afire.

The initial crew of brave firefighters to reach the scene of the fire went into the Third Avenue structure on a search-and-rescue mission, seeking residents who may have been trapped inside. Eventually, though, it became too dangerous for them to be there and they had to pull back.

I watched these men and women in action, saw them rushing into the face of very real danger, their own safety secondary to the job that faced them, and I wondered again at the bravery it takes for such selfless action. It’s the same kind of bravery that’s part of the makeup of law enforcement officers, EMTs and soldiers, and I daresay it’s a rare characteristic.

There’s an old saying about the bravery of people who run toward danger while others are running away from it, self-preservation propelling them to seek safety. That saying reached a new level of reality during 9-11, when firefighters and law enforcement officials ran toward the soon-to-collapse Twin Towers in search of victims, perhaps knowing that in doing so they were running toward their death.

That’s the same kind of bravery I saw in Albany Friday displayed by the brave men and women of AFD and Dougherty EMS.

We live in a skewed society today, one in which people who entertain us, but whose work is actually of little significance, make millions of dollars a year and are adored by hipster wannabes who think of the spotlight as an end-all, be-all. Meanwhile, we pay the people who matter — law enforcement, warriors, EMTs, firefighters, school teachers — peanuts in comparison. And these people who matter, who put their lives on the line on a daily basis, are often jeered at, looked upon with suspicion and derision, even seen as “targets” by a society that’s allowed the actions of a few among their membership to alter their perception for people who are the truest of public servants.

So Chiefs Scott, Jordan, Burns, EMS Director Sam Allen and all of the firefighters and EMTs who ran toward danger Friday in order to serve their community and do their job, I salute you all. It’s in times of danger that true heroes arise. In Albany, we have heroes.