Canadian, 55, helps save three people from a burning paratransit van

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Lorne Mansky doesn’t consider himself a hero, but the quick actions he took to help save three people from a burning paratransit van and avoid a tragedy are undeniably heroic.

“Had nobody seen it, had nobody taken action, those poor individuals just might have been stuck inside, and it would have been a very different story,” the 55-year-old IT consultant told the National Post in recounting the tale.

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Last Thursday morning, the Winnipeg man had just left his home in the city’s east end on the way to work when he spotted what appeared to be flames from beneath a privately operated accessible vehicle stopped opposite him at a four-way stop.

“It took me a couple of seconds to realize what was happening,” Mansky said.

His first efforts to alert the driver by honking his horn and flashing his lights went unheeded, so Mansky pursued the van, eventually pulling up alongside and yelling through an open passenger window that the vehicle’s undercarriage was on fire.

Both drivers stopped and quickly surmised a large piece of cardboard lodged beneath the vehicle had ignited.

“He was completely unaware,” Mansky explained of the man he described as an older gentleman, “so those flames, every time he slowed down, we’re feeding straight up into the engine compartment.”

The flaming cardboard couldn’t be dislodged by moving the vehicle, Mansky recounted, as it had already damaged the ability to change gears.

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After the onboard fire extinguisher failed to work, Mansky went looking for a garden hose at nearby homes in the subdivision but was only able to find a broomstick, which he tossed to another man who’d arrived on the scene and instructed him to use it to remove the flaming cardboard.

After the cardboard was knocked loose, the intensity ratcheted up when the driver opened the vehicle’s hood, feeding more oxygen to what had been a contained fire and causing “some pretty substantial flames” to erupt from the engine compartment.

That’s when Mansky started to take charge of the situation.

“I was quite vocal and suggested that we needed to get the passengers off the fan. I don’t think it had quite occurred to him yet. I think he was a little overwhelmed. “

One of the three passengers – all of whom Mansky said were young men in their 20s and 30s – wasn’t in a wheelchair and was able to disembark on his own, making it to safety. The driver then used the rear hydraulic ramp to unload another passenger in a large wheelchair, but the device failed when he attempted to raise it for the remaining chair-bound passenger, presumably damaged by the growing fire in the engine. Thankfully, the device can be operated manually.

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As the driver set about disconnecting the passenger’s chair, Mansky jumped into the burning vehicle where “every five to 15 seconds, there was some little miniature explosion or a pop happening under the hood.”

He said raising the lift manually took half a minute, give or take, but “it felt like five hours.”

With each pump of the handle only bringing the lift an inch or so closer to the top, Mansky said this was when he had his only fleeting thought about his own safety in the back of a burning vehicle.

“I was rather feverishly pumping that thing, hoping to get it up and there was that brief thought, ‘Boy, I sure hope I get this thing up here before the situation gets worse.’

“But any concept of me bailing out because I thought I might be in harm, that never occurred to me at that point. I guess that’s the adrenaline talking.”

Mercifully, Mansky noted, the mild breeze blowing on the crisp morning was coming from behind the vehicle, causing most of the smoke to move away and not make the rescue more harrowing.

The lift eventually reached its destination, the passenger was loaded and the hydraulics lowered on their own, allowing the man to be ferried to safety.

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Within two minutes of everyone being clear of the vehicle, the fire had spread to the main cabin and was set to engulf the van when firefighters arrived on the scene to knock it down within 10 minutes.

In a statement to the National Post, the Winnipeg Fire and Paramedic Service confirmed bystanders helped evacuate three passengers and said no injuries were reported. They also reported the vehicle was not part of the Winnipeg Transit Plus fleet, but were unable to provide any information about the service provider.

The gravity and seriousness of the situation dawned upon Mansky when one of the occupants, accompanied by his father, approached him at the scene to shake his hand and say “Thanks for saving my life.”

Mansky credits instincts imbued from 30-plus years in Kinsmen clubs – the Canadian non-profit focused on improving communities through service and events – for helping him maintain a cool head in leading the rescue efforts. He’s also thankful he wasn’t alone that morning.

“Thank God, a couple of people, I don’t know who they are, were all willing to help out to some degree, and that’s really the success of the story.”

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