Draguignan: a man saved from the flames in his house by two police officers

It was 7.45 p.m. on Monday evening when two brigadiers of the emergency police patrolling in their vehicle in Draguignan (Var) received a radio message. They had to go urgently to the heights of the city, where a house was on fire. It was a neighbor who alerted the emergency services, flames escaping from the windows of a villa.

“When we arrived there, the firefighters were not there yet, we were the first responders. A neighbor told us that the villa was occupied by a sixty-year-old, living alone, but he did not know if he was there. inside”, tells LCI Brigadier Benjamin Rodsphon.

Approaching the house, the two police officers saw the importance of the fire: windows were broken, shutters had melted, sounds of collapses were heard from outside and flames were coming out of the roof. “The main entrance door was not locked, we said to ourselves that there was someone inside, but impossible to enter through this access as the flames were so big”, continues the policeman.

The two men then walked around the house, and entered through the garage. “A staircase led to the living room. As we opened the door, it was really very impressive. We shouted to find out if anyone was inside and that’s when we heard a small voice: ‘I’m here, I’m in the kitchen’.”

The police, without thinking too much, rushed into the blaze and managed to reach the resident. “He was prostrate, his gaze as frozen, he did not know what to do at all”, says Benjamin Rodsphon. The three men managed to escape from the burning villa. “We were very lucky, because right after we got out, the ceiling collapsed over the door we entered through.” The 64-year-old man was asleep when the fire broke out, and was surprised by the blaze.

In all, 14 firefighters responded and spent several hours extinguishing the blaze. According to the SDIS of Var, the accidental track is privileged and the disaster would be of electrical origin. Brigadier Rodsphon and the inhabitant of the villa shared the ambulance which took them to the emergency room for mild poisonings due to smoke. In it, the rescued man warmly thanked the policeman, who told us: “It touched me enormously. It happens that we intervene first on fires, but rarely of such intensity. When I think back, I tell myself that we took a lot of risks, we didn’t not really aware of the danger because we were in the action. But we are happy with the outcome. ”