ID :
184364
Wed, 05/25/2011 - 14:03
Auther :

Men save baby from house fire in Melbourne



Tony Morris and Warwick Todd smashed a bedroom window to rescue a baby girl in a cot inside a burning home.
The rescuers had no idea where the eight-month-old baby was inside the house.
Miraculously, they broke the right window.
Mr Morris said he was driving down a Melbourne street around 2.30pm (AEST) on Wednesday when he saw smoke.
He quickly detoured to the Bentleigh East home which was fully alight and found a 23-year-old mother standing out the front, hysterical, screaming that her baby was inside.
The mother had suffered burns to her face as she escaped the blazing Surrey Street house carrying her other child, aged two-and-a-half.
The front door was impassable, so Mr Morris, an electrical wholesale company employee, and tradesman Warwick Todd leapt over the side fence and smashed a window.
Mr Morris still doesn't know why they chose that window but he's glad they did.
Smoke was completely obscuring their vision but they could hear a baby's cries.
The pair felt around with their hands and, to their astonishment, found a cot and felt the baby roll towards them.
Mr Morris, a father-of-one, plucked the infant from the smoky room and the pair rushed the child to a female neighbour who was a nurse.
"Once we heard the baby crying, we knew we had to do something," Mr Morris told AAP.
"We just started feeling around. I can still hear that crying in my head," he said.
Mr Morris said the pair remained remarkably calm throughout the ordeal but he now felt emotional.
"My heart's pumping out of my chest," he said.
"I don't know how I'll feel tomorrow. I know I've done something good."
Mr Morris said he felt for the anguished young mother.
"I can't imagine what it would have been like if it was my little boy in there," he said.
A Metropolitan Fire Brigade (MFB) spokesman said the fire was sparked by clothes drying in front of a heater.
The house did not have a working smoke alarm, the spokesman said.
Paramedic Ross Pollard said had the men not pulled the baby to safety, "we could have been looking at serious injury or even death".
The mother and her two children were taken to Monash Medical Centre for treatment for smoke inhalation.
"The MFB cannot stress enough the importance of having a working smoke alarm to help protect your family," the spokesman said in a statement.



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