LISBON —When Mike Morin pulled over the van carrying Bath Iron Works employees to let someone out on the nightly carpool around midnight Tuesday, he looked over and saw flames licking at the apartment house across Lisbon Street.

Jeff Young was in the passenger seat, dozing after working second shift as a welder at the shipyard, when Morin told him to get out and see if anyone was in the house. Young popped out of the van and ran across the street while Morin dialed 911.

“I saw there was a door to the right downstairs, so I started pounding on that door,” Young said. Moriah Paiement, who lives in the second-floor apartment with Lowell Saindon and their 2-year-old daughter, Annalyse, opened the door and asked him what he wanted. “Your house is on fire,” Young remembers yelling, and Paiement immediately said, “My baby is upstairs.”

She turned and ran up the stairs and Young was right behind her, he said. “The house was full of flames and smoke and stuff. I could hear the crackling and popping from the fire.”

Paiement grabbed her daughter and was holding her, but she and Saindon were disoriented by the smoke and flames. Young, who serves on the BIW volunteer fire brigade, said he had paid attention to the layout of the apartment as they ran upstairs and into the living area, so he called out to Paiement and Saindon and asked them to move toward his voice. “I know how to get out of here,” he said.

Young said he took Annalyse from her mother so Paiement could navigate the stairs, and she headed down first, followed by Young holding the toddler, and Saindon. As soon as they got outside, Young handed Annalyse to her mother, and saw Morin and some of the other BIW workers from the carpool pounding on doors and windows on the first floor trying to wake the tenants.

“There were people inside, but they wouldn’t come out,” Young said.

Morin said they tried everything to wake people up, including trying to trigger alarms in nearby parked cars.

Officer Richard St. Amant of the Lisbon Police Department arrived as the BIW employees and some neighbors were banging on a door. St. Amant kicked in the front door so they could get inside and convince people to leave, Young said.

In addition to Paiement, Saindon and their daughter on the second floor, three people escaped from the apartment on the first floor in the front of the building and two people escaped from an apartment in the rear.

Young said his training on the fire brigade and instinct took over as he climbed the stairs to that apartment. When he got home and started winding down from the drama, “it kind of hit me,” he said. “If we weren’t there, what would have been the outcome?”

He wondered whether the people in the three apartments would have woken up in time to get out safely.

According to Sgt. Joel Davis of the Fire Marshal’s Office, the fire is believed to have started on the second-story porch and is considered accidental. According to Lisbon Fire Chief Sean Galipeau, the fire is believed to have been started by improper disposal of smoking materials.

None of the tenants had insurance, according to fire officials at the scene early Wednesday.

Morin, who said he stopped the van at about 12:20 a.m., didn’t think it took 15 minutes to get everyone out of the house and get his passengers back in the van. The workers in the van are from the Lewiston-Auburn area and commute together to work every day. Young, who is 48, lives in Auburn; Morin, a ship-fitter at the shipyard for the past 29 years, is from Lewiston.

“I think what Jeff did was pretty heroic,” Morin said. “He went in there with the flames coming through the wall.”

The six-bedroom, two-story apartment building at 229 Lisbon St. was owned by Deborah Libby of Freeport. Its assessed value was $85,980. The building sustained about $40,000 in damage.

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