Rescued from the flames

Jonathan Tyrrell III clenched the hammer the whole time.

With it, he banged on tables, metal walls — anything he could find, hoping the noise would signal rescue firefighters where he was trapped in the expansive warehouse building.

A thick cloud of black smoke forced him onto his stomach. That hammer and his cell phone were his only lifelines to the world outside. He would be the last employee rescued from the Sofa Super Store before its collapse took the lives of nine firefighters.

His shift started out like any other. But as the Johns Island resident concentrated on his repairs, he caught a whiff of something burning.

From behind a partially open warehouse door, small flakes of charred ash drifted into his workshop.

Tyrrell, a 28-year-old of medium build, dropped his equipment and threw his weight against the door, fighting the pressure of a raging fire on the other side.

"I barely got it closed," he said.

Through another door, he saw that his second escape route — a utility door that leads to the warehouse — also was engulfed in flames.

He was trapped.

Tyrrell turned to his cell phone, which hardly gets reception in the living-room-size workshop on normal days. Now, he needed it to connect him with rescuers outside.

"Even with the light from the cell phone," he said, "all I could see was smoke."

Finally, his call to 911 went through, and a dispatcher transferred him to a firefighter who was on the scene outside.

"He said, 'OK, buddy, I'm coming in to get you,' and the reception cut off," Tyrrell said.

Then he gripped his hammer and started banging.

Emergency workers on the outside heard him. Some say the clanking noises saved his life.

Five minutes and an eternity passed as Tyrrell lay on the workshop floor.

On the other side, firefighters used their axes to rip through the structure's metal siding. Through the hole, Tyrrell saw the silhouette of a firefighter, who found him covered in soot.

"When we got (the hole) big enough to get him out, we got him out," Charleston Assistant Fire Chief Larry Garvin said. "Another two minutes and he would have been dead."

After squeezing through the tiny opening, Tyrrell wrapped his arms around the firefighters' shoulders, and they carried him to safety and an ambulance.

Emergency officials drove him to Medical University Hospital later that night where doctors told him he had breathed a large amount of hot air.

"My throat was burning real bad, like I got a bad sunburn," he said.

Now, Tyrrell has a request: He wants to find one of the firefighters who helped pull him to safety. The medium-size man has reddish patches of hair and a large tattoo on his arm.

Amid the chaos, Tyrrell didn't have time to catch the firefighter's name.

"I was just trying to catch my breath."

Nadine Parks contributed to this story. Reach Katy Stech at 937-5549 or kstech@postandcourier.com.