A SHENZHEN firefighter helped evacuate 24 passengers from a coach that caught fire near an expressway entry in Henan Province, the Shenzhen Evening News reported yesterday.

Cheng Hongwei is a community firefighter in Longgang District. He returned to his hometown in Henan for a vacation after his left forearm was injured in an accident July 26. The 47-year-old, with a bandage on his arm, took a coach back to Shenzhen on Aug. 11, but he didn’t expect that the journey would almost cost him his life.

At 11 a.m. Aug. 11, when the coach had almost entered Zhengyao Expressway in Lushan County in Henan, Cheng noticed smoke rising from the bottom of the coach. He immediately asked the driver, Yang Xuedong, to pull over and evacuate the other 24 passengers from the coach.

Most of the passengers on board were seniors, women and children. One passenger, Wu Yange, said she was so scared when she and her 7-year-old son got off the coach that all she could remember was dark smoke billowing from the coach.

A 70-year-old man failed to unfasten his seat belt during the evacuation, but his daughter and daughter-in-law were trying to get their son off the coach. Reminded by Cheng, the daughter returned to the coach and helped her father unfasten his seat belt and get off the coach.

Cheng, Yang and another young man found that the fire’s source was a cardboard box loaded with electronic products in the coach. Following Cheng’s lead, they removed the passengers’ luggage from the coach and tried to put out the fire with fire extinguishers.

Three armed police officers, who happened to be passing by, joined them in controlling the fire, but it grew stronger and all of them had to leave the site.

Local firefighters arrived at 11:36 a.m. and was put out the fire by 11:59 a.m., and the cause of the fire is being investigated, according to the report.

Yang has worked as a driver for 21 years, but he said he panicked when the accident took place and he would have been overwhelmed if Cheng hadn’t been there to help him evacuate the passengers.

Cheng moved to Shenzhen in 2003. He joined Shuijing Police Station in Longgang District as an auxiliary police officer in 2005, and became a community firefighter in 2013.

Cheng is known in his hometown for his warm heart. He has subsidized a seriously ill senior resident in his village for a long time. He launched a fundraising campaign with several other people for a postgraduate student who was diagnosed with cancer in Henan Province. A total of 23,000 yuan (US$3,433) was raised for the student following their efforts.

Cheng didn’t mention what happened Aug. 11 to his friends and colleagues after he returned to Shenzhen until one of his friends recognized him in an online video of the accident.

The coach company’s representatives and several passengers came to Longgang and offered a silk banner to Cheng on Aug. 24 to honor his bravery.

(Zhang Yang)