Hero off-duty FDNY firefighter rescues 4 pups from Brooklyn e-bike blaze: ‘The dogs, I need to get the dogs!’
It was a ruff rescue.
A quick-thinking off-duty FDNY firefighter pulled four French bulldogs from a Brooklyn apartment blaze Friday after an e-bike exploded into “a giant fireball” just feet away from him, he told The Post.
“I said, ‘We need to go right now,’” hero smoke-eater Joe Pendergast, 33, told the frantic apartment tenant.
“He said, ‘The dogs, I need to get the dogs!’ I said, ‘Don’t worry about the dogs, we’ll get the dogs, we need to go.’”
Pendergast had been driving from his home on Staten Island to work at Ladder 113 in Prospect Lefferts Gardens at around 7:30 a.m. when he saw black smoke billowing from the building.
He pulled over, and a panicked woman directed him to a burning apartment on the second floor, where nine French bulldogs and their owner were inside.
“The door was melting down from the heat. It was a steel-plated door,” he said. “I was really just kind of sizing it up and thinking what was possible with what I had at the moment.”
Despite the smoke and scalding flames, the dog owner kept trying to save his pups.
“He took a little bit of convincing, he didn’t want to leave the dogs,” Pendergast said.
But “fight or flight kicked in” and they both bolted from the apartment, with Pendergast crawling on his hands and knees under the smoke.
Just as they were leaving, an e-bike by the front door — whose battery likely sparked the blaze — suddenly exploded.
“There was no sound, no hissing or anything, it just blew up,” he said.
“It just turned into a giant fireball. It looked like if I lit a Christmas tree up. The heat coming out immediately after was just insane.”
One of his Ladder 113 colleagues rushed to the building and helped him suppress the fire and pull four French bulldogs out of the home.
Tragically, the other five dogs died.
Pendergast suffered a second-degree burn on his hand from grabbing the door handle on the way out, he said.
Ultimately, he called responding to e-bike fires “very frustrating” because they’re easily preventable.
“Use the right charger and don’t do it in your house,” he said. “They’re very dangerous.”
