The entrance door to the Pulse nightclub was completely blocked by trapped individuals piled up to the height of a firefighter’s head; extracting a single person often required the efforts of at least two or three people, said firefighter Blagojcho Paunov in his court testimony Tuesday. He had been on duty with the Kochani Territorial Firefighting Unit on the night of the tragic fire.
Testifying at the trial of 13 police officers accused of failing to act in accordance with the operational plan at the Pulse nightclub, Paunov stated that the report of the fire was received at 2:35 a.m. from the duty dispatcher, and the first fire rig arrived at the scene within about five minutes.
According to his testimony, upon arrival, the area surrounding the nightclub was filled with injured and fallen people, as well as civilians and police officers; consequently, the fire rig could only approach as far as the crowd of people allowed.
When the firefighters headed toward the door, everyone present directed them there due to the large number of trapped individuals.
“The entrance door was packed with trapped people piled up to the height of my head. At that moment, only a small amount of smoke was coming from the door, and there were no visible flames,” Paunov said. He explained that he and a colleague immediately began pulling people out, but realized right from the first attempt that the process would be extremely difficult and slow.
“It was very hard for a single person to pull someone out on their own. The weight involved in such a situation is immense; usually, a minimum of two—and sometimes three—people were needed to extract one person,” the firefighter testified.
The witness noted that he had asked for assistance from police officers and civilians present at the scene. He specifically called upon police officer Dragan Petrushev, known as Kazak, to gather as many officers as possible to join the rescue effort. They also sought help from the facility’s security personnel, who, according to him, were already exhausted from earlier attempts to pull people out.
Once mixed teams comprising firefighters, police officers, security staff, and civilians were formed, the organized extraction of the trapped individuals began.
“From that moment on, we worked together to pull people out, sometimes with a police officer, sometimes with security staff, and sometimes with a civilian. Every extraction was different,” Paunov said.
At a critical moment, as he described it, they spotted two young girls in the bottom-most layer of the crowd; the girls were conscious and calling for help.
“We had to crawl underneath to pull them out, while other teams above us continued to extract people. Each person pulled out was immediately taken to the parking area, where medical teams and Red Cross representatives were already stationed,” said Paunov.
He testified that after clearing a large part of the entrance, firefighting crews began entering the building with hose lines to extinguish the fire. Meanwhile, they received information that people were also trapped in the room designated as the ticket office, located on the right side of the nightclub.
Upon entering that area, he found about ten unconscious individuals, as well as others who were conscious and calling for help from the section leading to the main area of the nightclub.
In his testimony, Paunov stressed that the firefighters’ priority from the very first moment was saving lives, rather than extinguishing the fire.