“I wasn’t going to go out, just me, and watch people burn. Yes, I took out 14…” When we question Emmanuel Marcant, he speaks of “instinct”. This man, domiciled on a barge in Rouen (Seine-Maritime), is a hero. A real.
Last week, in Egypt, he saved 14 people from flames and certain death, during the accident of a tourist bus in which he had taken place.
Traveling for a week, “with family, on the Nile”, the stay turned into a nightmare on Wednesday morning, at sunrise, on the way to an excursion.
“Everyone was sleeping on the bus, except me”
On the way to the temples of Abu Simbel, “everyone was sleeping on the bus, except me”, he tells 20 minutes. Around 6 o’clock, a pick-up transporting fish crashed violently under the front of the bus. “My head banged, but I managed to break down the back door and get people out, one after another. I screamed but everyone was stunned, ”he explains. So he continued, keeping his cool. The bus will quickly be in flames “because of the oil which flowed from the pick-up”.
With a quavering voice, he continues: “There was so much black smoke, I never managed to get the extinguisher up front”. The accident caused the death of two Egyptians in the pick-up, the pilot, the co-pilot and the guide in the bus, and five tourists, including a couple from Normandy, from the agglomeration of Caen (Calvados). “They were in the smoke, did not respond, I think about it all the time,” he repeats.
His companion, Stéphanie, speaks in Paris Normandy “Without him, I would have died and many others too,” she says. In the regional daily, Emmanuel Marcant, a 49-year-old welder, who works in the maintenance of boats on the Seine, explains that he settled in the back of the bus by reflex. “Because in the army, I was told to settle there because accidents are often at the front,” he slips.