Rolling up to the front of the market while firemen swarmed along the rooftop hosing down the out-of-control blaze, Pritchard immediately threw on his fireproof coat and sprinted into the store, seemingly completely oblivious to the smoke and fire swirling around him. Jack Pritchard’s shift had ended a half-hour ago, but it’s not like that was going to stop this guy from hauling ass mask-first into a raging inferno to save his firefighter brothers. Fire teams had gone in to get those people out, but they’d run into trouble – a lot of it.

It was early in the morning when a huge fire had broken out at Waldbaum’s Supermarket in Brooklyn, trapping several shoppers and construction workers inside. Pritchard’s next major battle with flesh-melting heat came on August 2nd, 1978, when he was there for one of the most tragic days in FDNY history. He’d sustain second-degree burns on large swaths of his body, but it would take a hell of a lot more than that to keep Jack Effin’ Pritchard down.

Pritchard hit the ground hard, crashing into the second floor, where a hose team shot him with some water and evacuated both Pritchard and the boy to ambulances. He grabbed the kid, held him tight, and leapt over the banister rail towards the second floor. Unable to breathe, with flames catching his uniform on fire and part of the ceiling coming down on top of him, Firefighter Jack Pritchard did the only logical thing that came into his mind in the heat of the moment. Pritchard smothered the flames, grabbed onto the kid, and prepared to head back, but the second he turned around the bullshit front door of the apartment closed and locked him out. When he couldn’t find the boy in the apartment, he went out the front door into the hall, where he found the kid laying at the top of the apartment building stairwell, his clothes on fire. The window was just a little too small to accommodate the oxygen tank he had strapped to his back, so naturally Pritchard did the completely batshit insane thing, took off his O2 tank, and climbed into the smoke-filled burning building without any supplemental oxygen.Ĭrawling around on the floor in an effort to avoid being immediately killed by the massive obscene amounts of black smoke that blackened the entire interior of the building, Pritchard made his way through the boy’s apartment, desperately trying to find him before it was too late. He grabbed a ladder, threw it up against the side of the building, and sprinted to the top, smashing out a window and entering the building. With the first two floors completely engulfed in raging, rapidly-growing flames and a developmentally-disabled boy allegedly trapped up on the top floor, Pritchard didn’t even wait for orders before he sprung into action like a boss.

Pritchard’s first documented experience putting himself at “extreme personal risk” for the sake of being totally fucking awesome came in 1975, when Rescue 2 responded to a three-story building that, by the time they got there, had already been lit up like a Kuwaiti oil field fire. Pritchard joined the Department in 1970 and quickly joined up with Rescue 2, an elite unit of the FDNY that specialized in showing up first to the scene, pulling people out of burning buildings while the structure collapsed around them, and then getting the hell out of there before they were crushed to death by flaming cinderblocks or asphyxiated from an insane amount of smoke inhalation. Standing all of five foot five and weighing in at a little over a hundred and fifty pounds, John J.

“If you’re ever trapped in a fire, he’s the one you want coming for you.”

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