12/21/2018
This young lady helped rescue several people from yesterday’s fire in Mentor, she really is a hero. We are glad to hear that no one was injured at all!
Good morning friends,
Thursday’s early morning fire had us pretty busy. It left us all pretty tired. We were fortunate to get this fire under control in less than an hour thanks to the hard work of our firefighters and the mutual aid cities that helped us out.
And most importantly, we are very happy to announce that there were no injuries.
However, we want to share with you how different this morning could have been for all of us if it hadn’t been for the heroic actions of one employee of “New Avenues To Independence, Inc”, or NATI that manages the special needs group home that was on fire.
Cortney Noble, 25 years old, is an employee of NATI and was alone caring for three residents in the group home. One resident is wheelchair bound and the other two are ambulatory and all require special needs.
Cortney had heard a cracking & popping sound in the garage and opened the door to find a wall of smoke and flames that had now started to push into the structure. She slammed the door and as quick as she could pushed the wheelchair resident out and returned for the other two residents. She got them out and called 911.
Upon our first due engine’s arrival in less than a minute, there was heavy fire and smoke showing and the feeling we had was we hoped no one was in there!
Cortney had met us and told us she got everyone out and they were all accounted for. You have no idea what a sigh of relief that was. As our firefighters were performing an aggressive primary search to confirm that there was no one in the structure we shifted to a defensive fire attack.
Cortney and the three residents were checked out and were welcomed to be sheltered into the “Dedicated To Children Daycare” that was nearby. The NATI management team quickly arrived and went to work getting clothing, medicine and finding all three residents housing.
Our Fire chief, Bob Searles had met with Cortney in the aftermath to praise her for her heroic actions and unfortunately, tell her that her car was destroyed by the fire. She was very humble and just asked if she could just retrieve from the car, a base to the car seat for her baby at home.
Please pardon this very long post, but we wanted to just tell all of our friends that yesterday the Mentor fire department met a hero, her name is Cortney Noble.
We will all enjoy Christmas a little better because of her.