By KATHY OGDEN
Special to the Courant, The Hartford Courant

Fire Lt. Todd Ghent credits instinct with saving his life as a propane cloud he unintentionally walked into erupted in flames.

As the orange fireball enveloped him last January, without thinking he held his breath. This kept the burning gas, which ignites in the air at nearly 1,000 degrees, out of his lungs.

“They said it would have cooked my lungs,” Ghent recalled in an interview last week in his dining room, which was still decorated for Christmas.

The flames left him with second- and third-degree burns on his head, face and neck, though.

Ghent said it would take a whole day and night to convey all the thoughts that ran through his mind in the moments he was engulfed. He thought particularly about his wife, Renee, and teenage daughter, Amanda, a sophomore at Portland High School, he said.

“I remember it all,” he said.

Ghent had been among the firefighters who responded to the scene of a leaking underground propane tank last Jan. 29. A 30-year volunteer with the Portland Fire Department, he was supposed to be in Vermont that weekend, skiing with his wife and daughter but 20 inches of snow had fallen in Connecticut so he decided to stay home and work clearing roofs and plowing snow.

He was with fellow town firefighter Tom Revicki when they heard the call for a gas leak at a duplex on Summer Street. They were the first on the scene and could smell gas. Putting on protective gear, they began to evacuate people from the area. As other firefighters arrived, Ghent and firefighter Tim Goff started moving down the snow-lined driveway with a gas detection meter that measures how much of the invisible gas is in the air. Suddenly, the meter reading spiked and they turned to leave, but it was too late.

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