After 38 Years, FDNY Firefighter Meets Woman he Rescued
Source Firehouse.com News
A nurse from Virginia who came to New York City to help during the COVID-19 pandemic was reunited with an FDNY firefighter who saved her and her mother in 1983.
Last year Deirdre Taylor returned to New York City to volunteer at a hospital to help overwhelmed health care workers. Taylor carried with her a newspaper that had an account of the rescue.
After an evening celebration of health care workers outside NYU Langone Hospital, Taylor asked a firefighter to help her track down the man who rescued her.
The firefighter helped connect Taylor with, Eugene Pugliese, who received FDNY's Walter Scott Medal for his actions in 1983.
Pugliese, of Ladder 20, recalled that he was checking a broken pipe on Dec. 29 when a man when someone told him about the fire at 64 Wooster Street.
"I didn’t even have my gear on, just a helmet and an ax," Pugliese said last year of the rescue from the sixth floor of an apartment building.
He found heavy smoke and inside he found a woman, recalling: "She was yelling ‘my baby, my baby!’ I carried her into another room and proceeded into the room that was on fire. I found Deirdre and I was so glad. I crawled in on my belly and didn’t have any equipment, I was lucky to have found her."
After two rescue breaths, Taylor began to cry and the two were pulled from the burning building.
"The name of the Firefighter that rescued me was always with me," Taylor told FDNY. "I had always wanted to track down the Firefighter who saved me, so I could say thank you."
Last year Pugliese and Taylor spoke on the phone and Saturday they met in person at the Ladder 20's lower Manhattan firehouse.
