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Bright lights, big hero
(by Karen F. Mrnarevic - January 02, 2008)
What started as a relaxing evening at the movies for Emerson native Brian Roth turned into a fight to contain a blaze in the IMAX theater inside the
Palisades
Center mall in
West Nyack, N.Y., early Sunday morning. The small fire resulted in no injuries, but had Roth not been on the scene, the story might not have had such a happy ending.
Roth had just settled into his back row seat at the theater for a midnight showing of “I am Legend,” when he noticed a spotlight was aimed directly at the screen, preventing a clear view of a portion of the movie. A perturbed movie-goer exited the theater and returned with someone Roth assumed to be a manager.
After fussing with the light, which was located beneath the screen in the orchestra pit, the manager seemed to have turned the light off. However, once the man left the theater, Roth, who spent four years in the U.S. Navy, realized that the light had not been turned off, but was being obscured by something.
“Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a red slit at the bottom of the screen,” Roth recalls, “I automatically had my danger-sense going.” Within seconds, Roth says he knew it was a fire. He ran to the front of the theater to investigate, and found that the light that had been shining on the screen was now covered with a blue plastic tarp, which had caught fire. Roth says that he estimates the flames were already a few feet high.
“I turned around and faced the audience and yelled, ‘Look, I don’t work here, I’m just a customer, but everybody has to stand up and walk out of here. It’s an emergency.’” Everyone in the theater seemed somewhat disbelieving and confused, until Roth clarified, “There’s a fire, and I’m gonna put it out.” He says that he stood there and tried to shout directions to people, urging them to remain calm and exit the theater as quickly as possible.
He then took his cell phone out and dialed 911, and placed the phone back in his pocket, thinking that the call would be traced. Afraid that waiting for the fire department to arrive would take too long, Roth located a fire extinguisher inside of an emergency exit. “I had to knock over two guys to get to the extinguisher. They were just standing there, frozen,” he says. Had he not taken the initiative to extinguish the fire, Roth believes it would have quickly reached the screen and easily could have gotten out of control.
Before discharging the fire extinguisher, Roth says he turned to the remaining people in the theater and told them to cover their noses and mouths and get out right away. “I know that the propellant from the extinguisher can be toxic, so I tried to get everybody out before using it,” he says.
Roth was able to extinguish the fire before it reached the screen, and he then turned to exit the theater, gathering stragglers up and urging them to move toward the door. “At that point the manager came in in a panic,” he says, “and I had to tell him, ‘Don’t go in there. There is smoke and fumes.’”
After putting out the fire, Roth was relieved to see that the fire department had arrived “in a flash.” It turns out that the fire had triggered a silent alarm, which automatically notified the fire departments in
West Nyack and two other nearby towns. “The fire inspector saw that I had put out the fire and asked, ‘Are you a fire fighter?’ I said, ‘I was just watching the movie.’”
Roth credits his time in the military for preparing him for emergencies like this. “I guess from being in the Navy, I knew that what I saw was a fire, and I knew how to control the crowd… I have been through a ton of training. I was on a ship for four years in and we trained to fight fires every day.” Roth adds that he was surprised that no one else in the theater made any attempt to help.
He goes on to point out that the situation could have been much worse if he had not taken the initiative to put out the fire. “I’m not on anybody’s payroll for fighting fires and controlling crowds. I was right by the exit; I could have run out. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do,” he says bluntly.
However, far from patting himself on the back, Roth said he was trying to keep the whole incident quiet. “My girlfriend made me tell my family… they all thought it was a much bigger deal than I did” he says. “I guess that comes from being in the Navy… wanting to help people and taking charge of situations.”
As for the series of human errors leading up to the fire, Roth is convinced that whoever covered the light made a mistake that could have been deadly. “That place would have gone up like a tinderbox if I hadn’t been there to put it out.”
West Nyack Fire Chief George Drescher is grateful that someone of Roth’s experience was there to control the fire. “Everything he [Roth] did was right out of the book. He really did a nice job,” Drescher says. Drescher cannot comment in detail about the incident due to a pending investigation by the Fire Inspector, who will set out to discover “what was placed over the light and who put it there.” He adds that since he may never cross paths with Roth again he wanted to pass along a message: “If you see that young man, tell him I said thank you.”
Brian Roth is currently a senior at
Penn
State majoring in Psychology and Biological Anthropology. After graduation, he plans on going to law school. He says that even though he has been around the world he does not usually get homesick, he finds that being back in Emerson makes him realize how much he has missed his hometown.
Isaac Boateng, the IMAX Theater’s operations manager, did not wish to comment. The Theater Director could not be reached prior to print date.
Karen F. Mrnarevic's e-mail address is Mrnarevic@northjersey.com
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