Inferno plunge fireman asked for his wife

A fireman held his colleague’s hands and asked for his wife as he lay dying on the ground, an inquest heard today.

Joe McCloskey, 50, pleaded with emergency workers to contact his family and asked whether he was going to die after falling into a burning shed in Limavady, Co Derry, in November 2003.

Glen Anderson pulled him from the blazing hotel storeroom and comforted him as he lay waiting for an ambulance.

“I recall Joe asking me at one point was he going to die, to which I replied to look at my faith and everything would be okay,” he told the hearing in Derry.

The victim suffered horrific burns on his chest, stomach and legs, with clothes burned off him and his skin coming off in the hands of his rescuers.

He was using a sledgehammer to break a hole in the roof of the store at the Gorteen House Hotel when it collapsed and he fell into the inferno.

Mr Anderson plunged into the smoke-filled outbuilding with two colleagues to save him, putting his own life at risk.

Another of the rescuers, Darren Hylands, recalled: “I had never felt heat like it before, we were laying flat on the ground and crawling in.”

He had earlier been inside the shed but had been forced back by the intense heat.

At one point he heard a hissing sound like gas and a cylinder was later pulled from the scene.

When searching for Mr McCloskey he said: “I saw two hands sticking up in the air and heard the squeals from Joe.

“My hands kept slipping off his hands.”

The crew managed to extricate the father-of-five, from Station Road, Dungiven, but he died the following day in Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry.