Nicknamed "The White Rhino", 220-pound 8-year veteran firefighter Jeff Griffin, along with his team, answered a 12:30 call to battle an accidental house fire. At about 1 p.m. on July 1, 1989, Ladder Company 27 arrived at a house fire near the intersection of 60th Street and Greenway Road. Jeff Griffin and other firefighters at the scene started to vent the fire by sawing a hole in the roof. Captain Rick Pesce led the way across the top of the roof, testing the roof by pounding it with his axe. As Jeff sawed through the roof, smoke began pouring out. In just a matter of seconds, the smoke turned into a huge wall of flames. "It sounded like a swoosh, and it was a blowtorch," Griffin recalled, "I said, ‘Time to exit.'" The firefighters began to retreat from the flames by running across the roof when "something felt strange, and I said to myself, ‘what's wrong with this picture.' As soon as I turned around to look for the others, I saw my captain's foot drop into the attic. Behind him, Pete [a fellow firefighter] dropped in up to his chest. There was 20 feet of flames shooting out all around him." "I looked into their eyes - they were as big as round as a fishbowl. They knew, I knew they were dead. There was no time to do anything else but to make an attempt to save them." Griffin then charged back across the roof towards the fallen firefighters. "I took one step, the second was like nothing, like air," he said. As the roof collapsed beneath his feet, Jeff rode a 4' x 8' sheet of plywood into the already flame-engulfed attic. Inside the attic, one breath of the nearly 2,000 degree air would have seared his lungs and taken his life. As he fell sideways, he grabbed onto an attic beam and his foot landed on another. "I could see the whole attic, all in flames," Griffin recalled. " I could see the plumbing, and I was looking for a place to drop through were my bottle wouldn't get hung up. We're taught to go on through, but I didn't know what was down below, and I thought it might be worse than what I was in. That's all I had time to think about. Then my face piece clouded up, my air turned hot. I panicked." Griffin decided it was better to get out of the attic the way he came in. "I could feel the beam where my foot was solid," Jeff recalled. "I crouched down and did a ‘Mary Lou Retton' back flip out onto the roof." The other firefighters had managed to scramble out from they had fallen into the attic of the burning house. Captain Pesce grabbed Jeff's air bottle and steered him toward the edge of the roof. "I was screaming. It was so hot. All I could see through the mask was my gloves and sleeves, and they were smoking. I was pulling my mask, ripping it off, and I got a good breath and that felt good, but I was still hot and getting hotter. The suit just keeps it in." "I flipped off my gloves - my hands felt like they were burning - and I headed for the edge of the roof. I was going to jump, but someone guided me to the ladder. I didn't even turn around, I just ran down it, front first, trying to pull my stuff off on the way." All firefighters survived with minor injuries. Griffin was taken to the local hospital, treated, and then sent home that same afternoon. Jeff sent his burned gear to a PBI laboratory. Testing showed the equipment had survived an estimated 2,000 degrees for over 7 seconds. 'I thought I was the only man in the world. It was hotter than anything you can describe.'

Jeff Griffin Phoenix Firefighter