By Holly Fesperman LeeSalisbury Post
EAST SPENCER ó An East Spencer firefighter who pulled a young boy from a house fire was honored this week for his heroic service.
Joshua Smith received the Rowan County Fire Marshall’s Award for Exemplary Service during the East Spencer Board of Aldermen meeting Monday night.
Smith saved the 4-year-old from his burning home on Long Street on Jan. 17.
The child’s mother first got him safely out of the home, but he followed her back inside when she went to rescue her two infants.
When she noticed the oldest child wasn’t with her, the woman told Smith and he immediately went inside and rescued the boy.
Smith didn’t want to take a lot of credit for rescuing the little boy. He said he was just doing his job.
“That’s really how I see it. Something needed to be done and I did it. Somebody has to do it,” he said.
Smith said he was surprised by the award but very appreciative.
“It takes more than one person to really do what happened that day on that incident scene,” he said. “The credit should really go to the department and the mutual aid departments.”
Smith said he didn’t know what made him want to be a firefighter, but he started when he was 18. Now 21, he’s been with the East Spencer department for a little less than a year; he started as a volunteer in Cabarrus County.
“I like working with the people, and it’s just an interesting experience,” Smith said.
When he first became a firefighter, Smith said he thought about having to save a person from a burning building.
Colleagues told him, he said, that ” ‘sooner or later, if you stay in it long enough you’re going to come to that point and you just have to deal with it.’
“I didn’t expect mine to be sooner rather than later.”
Smith said firefighters always hope they won’t be put in that situation when they go to a fire scene, but “you want to know that you’re ready and you’re willing and capable of handling that incident. They say it takes a special breed to run into a burning building when everybody else is running out.”
Contact Holly Lee at 704-797-7683 or hlee@salisburypost.com.