A lorry driver on his daily delivery round saved a man from a burning building on Granby Row in Dublin’s north inner city on Monday morning.
A video posted to social media shows Tomasz Zareba, who delivers groceries for the Eurospar chain, parking his lorry outside the burning building, allowing a man to jump from a window to land on the vehicle.
Mr Zareba told The Irish Times he “thought it would be much safer for him to jump on the lorry instead of the footpath”.
The driver had already seen someone jump from the building before parking his lorry beside the window.
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“One guy was lying on the footpath. He had blood on his face, and I think he might have broken both his legs when he jumped from the building,” he said.
He then saw another man “screaming from the window”.
“He didn’t know what he was supposed to do because he had flames behind him, and the long drop below him,” said Mr Zareba, who is originally from Poland and said he has been driving lorries in Ireland since 1998.
“I reversed the lorry as close as I safely could to the window, and the other lads from the footpath told him to jump on the roof of the lorry.
“He was okay, I think. I asked him how many people were in the building, but he didn’t know because he was in shock.”
The lorry driver waited at the scene “in case maybe somebody else would need to jump from the window”.
Once Dublin Fire Brigade arrived, Mr Zareba left and continued his deliveries for the day.
Gardaí assisted emergency services at the scene at about 8.15am.
Six fire engines attended the fire. Seven people were treated at the scene, three of whom were hospitalised.
The cause of the fire is not yet known.
Joanne Mellon, logistics director at BWG Foods, which owns and operates Eurospar, commended Mr Zareba for his “quick thinking”.
“It was an incredibly brave intervention, with the assistance of others who were in the area, in what must have been a very frightening experience,” she said.
