by JOHN ANNESE
ADVANCE STAFF WRITER
An off-duty firefighter and a group of motorists helped pull a driver to safety from his overturned, flaming car in Emerson Hill yesterday morning.
A silver sedan coming off the Clove Road exit of the Brooklyn-bound Staten Island Expressway at 11:12 a.m. banged into three cars, then was struck by a fourth at the intersection of Clove and Emerson Drive.
The impact flipped the sedan onto its side, with the driver's door pinned shut.
Michael Hartnett, 28, an off-duty firefighter from Great Kills' Ladder Co. 82, was headed home from an FDNY basketball game when he saw the wreck.
He jumped out of his car and climbed onto the sedan. When I looked in, I saw the guy looking at me, Hartnett said.
The driver, whom authorities have not yet identified, was conscious but stunned.
That's when Hartnett saw flames coming out of the underside of the vehicle.
The whole underneath was going, he said.
He didn't have time to try to pull the driver out from atop the car, so he decided to try to push it back onto its wheels. Three men and a woman stopped and got out of their vehicles to help him, and managed to get the vehicle upright - and the driver out.
Hartnett suspects the motion of righting the car may have slowed the spread of the flames.
He did a great job, said Chief Robert Miuccio of FDNY Battalion 22, who responded to the scene.
The driver, who suffered only minor injuries, said, I want to call my wife, and kept repeating that he was on his way to see a doctor, Hartnett said.
Hartnett, a Tottenville native who lives in Dongan Hills with his wife, was reluctant to take credit for the save.
The firefighter said he responded instinctively when he saw the overturned car, and just reacted step by step as events unfolded.
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