Wayland Firefighter Praised for Valentine's Day Heroics

WAYLAND, MA - Will Tyree hasn’t been a firefighter for that long, but he certainly has the rescuing people part of the job deeply ingrained.

Tyree said he was headed to his home in Roslindale to get ready for work at around 3 p.m. on Valentine’s Day when he spotted black smoke coming from the rear of a home near Stearns Road and Washington Street in West Roxbury.

“It was very black,” Tyree said. “It was a lot darker than typical chimney smoke or wood stove smoke. I was thinking initially, ’I’ll just check it out. There’s no reason for me not to check it out. Better safe than sorry.’”

He turned in to investigate and found a fire in a recycling bin and flames beginning to spread up the back of the house.

Tyree jumped into action, pulling the bin away from the house and then knocking on the door to see if anyone was home. When no one answered, Tyree entered, yelling, “Is anybody home?” He said he made it halfway through the kitchen before hearing a man speak out.

An elderly woman with a walker and her developmentally disabled son were sitting on the sofa.

“I told them, ‘You need to get out. Your house is on fire,’” Tyree said, explaining that the man left on his own and Tyree carried the woman out of the house. He took them to his car where they could stay warm until Boston emergency personnel arrived.

Then Tyree went to work on the fire.

Tyree looked around for a garden hose or fire extinguisher and finding neither grabbed a small recycling bin and dumped piles of snow on the flames until Boston firefighters arrived.

“The back side of the house was going pretty quickly, so I was just trying to keep it from spreading,” he said.

Meanwhile, Kelly Miklavcic, Tyree’s friend who was with him at the time, cared for and spoke with the woman and her son. The woman told Miklavcic, Tyree said, that a parrot and cat were in the home; Miklavcic relayed that info to Boston firefighters when they arrived.

Tyree said he assumed the pets were uninjured as the fire never grew too big. He said he believed the home’s occupants were able to go back inside once the flames were extinguished.

All of Tyree’s heroics would have gone unnoticed in Wayland except that a Boston fire chief reached out to Wayland Fire Chief David Houghton on Tuesday to commend his firefighter.

“It’s just nice,” Houghton said. “Will is just one of those people, like the majority we have here, who would do anything for anybody. He never said a word to me, I had to find out in a voicemail.”

Tyree joined the Wayland Fire Department in May 2011 as a paramedic and completed his firefighting training at the Massachusetts Fire Academy in October 2011.

“Once you’re a firefighter, you’re always a firefighter,” Houghton said. “It’s a 24/7 job and even when you’re not working, you’re always looking around and being aware. It just shows the caliber of people I work with here.”

Even with all the activity, and a fire truck blocking his car for a time, Tyree said he still made it to Wayland in time for his shift that day.