He still doesn’t believe it this morning.

Fire — possibly caused by a ruptured line spewing gasoline beneath his mail truck — consumed the vehicle while he was delivering mail on Stuart Drive, but not before Howard had pulled every piece of mail in eight large trays to safety.

But the 30-year veteran of the U.S. Postal Service sloughs off any notion that he’s a hero.

“No, I’m not,” he insists. “I didn’t do anything anybody else wouldn’t do.”

Howard had stopped to deliver a package at the Charles Goldman home on Stuart Drive.

“And when I got back, I smelled gas,” he says, “so I looked under the truck. Gas was dripping down and burning on the road.”

Fearing that it would explode, he got in.

“And I put it out of gear and let it roll back.”

Then he jumped out of the truck and ran to the back.

“I had to go to the back because the smoke was so bad, and I started throwing mail out as quick as I could,” he says.

“I didn’t even think about (the danger) until I got out. Then you think about the things that could have happened. I think I was pretty safe getting it out. I’m pretty sure I got everything out, unless something fell behind.

“I tried to tell the customers that if something was missing for them to call up the office and we could check.”

But, he says, “I was scared. I sure was. It more shocked me than anything else because the truck had been running fine.” He’d been driving it for a couple of years. Made by Grumann, the truck is generally referred to as an LLV — a long life vehicle. “I’ve never had anything like this to happen.

“Mrs. Goldman and the James Pannabackers called 911, thank goodness, and the neighbors were real nice. They came out and checked on me. They were real kind. You start thinking of the worst things that could happen but didn’t nothing bad happen other than just losing the truck.

“I was just praying the fire department would get there before it got to the gas tank and there was a real bad explosion. There was one real loud explosion. I think that’s when most of the neighbors noticed that it was on fire. They heard that noise.”

One was Julie Rosamond, a sophomore at Catawba College, who lives with her parents, John and Billie McCaskill at 300 Stuart Drive.

She was upstairs studying for an exam, she says, “and I heard this huge boom. I thought somebody shot a shotgun off right in front of my house. I ran and looked out the window, and I saw the truck just up in flames.”

She ran outside and asked neighbors who were already out watching what had happened. They told her that Howard had just stepped back when it burst into flames.

“They were huge!”

A communications major and a camera buff, she says she realized as it was burning that nobody was taking any pictures.

“And you just don’t see this every day, so Iran to my car and grabbed my camera and started taking pictures. The neighbors were just standing around watching. He was just standing watching. There was nothing he could do. I had never seen anything like it. It was shocking and to think it was happening right in front of my house!”

She left for her exam. Fire trucks and the fire marshal arrived.

For the fire to burn so fast, he said, he a line had ruptured and the gas was feeding the fire.

The post office keeps vehicles up “very well,” Howard says, so he doesn’t believe anybody could have done anything to stop it.

Except the fire department after the damage was done. Salisbury firemen got the fire out, Howard’s supervisor brought another truck, “and Ijust put the mail in there and kept on going. There’s not much you can do after that but keep going. It was a real shocker.”

And the people on the rest of his route might not have noticed that their mail was a little late.