President Joe Biden on Monday again repeated an exaggerated story about his Delaware home catching fire as he showed up at a Philadelphia fire station that was able to reopen thanks to a $22.4 million federal grant.
The president kicked off his appearance by complimenting his local fire station in Wilmington, Delaware, for helping him get through a snowstorm and to the hospital when he suffered a cranial aneurysm in 1988.
Biden told the crowd gathered at Ladder 1 in Philadelphia that he had received “an admission and full disclosure” that firefighters saved his life.
“They also saved my house and my wife's life,” the president said, telling a story that raised eyebrows among fact-checkers. “And my wife was there and my dog and my cat and my '67 Corvette, but all joking aside, they saved my wife, they got her out, saved my house.”
The president told how lightning struck a pond behind his home in Wilmington, struck a wire and rose three stories.
President Joe Biden again told an exaggerated story about how firefighters saved his wife's life during a house fire in Delaware in 2004. According to news reports at the time, no injuries were reported and the fire was contained to one room
The Bidens' home in Wilmington, Delaware, caught fire in 2004 after lightning struck the pond behind it and ignited a wire running along the side of the house, the president said Monday. Fact-checkers have previously called him out for blowing up this story
“And the smoke literally got so thick, literally so thick, you saw it, you saw it,” Biden said.
News reports of the 2004 fire stated that “there were no injuries and firefighters contained the blaze to one room,” the newspaper said. the Wilmington News Journal.
The story did say that “firefighters from the Cranston Heights, Talleyville, Elsmere, Mill Creek and Hockessin fire departments arrived and observed heavy smoke coming from the home.”
In August, The Washington Post reports this that Biden had told the house fire story at least six times as president, including to victims of the Maui wildfires earlier that month.
On Monday, the president also claimed that Republican President Ronald Reagan would lend him Marine One so he could be flown to Walter Reed during his aneurysm scare, but the snowstorm prevented that.
“It was in the middle of a snowstorm. No joke. I couldn't figure out how – President Reagan was nice enough to send Air Force…Helicopter One to take me down, but we couldn't fly,” Biden recalled, noting how his local fire department transported him instead.
The president was serving in the US Senate at the time.
At Monday's event, Biden again praised the firefighters in the room, telling them they are “crazy” people.
President Joe Biden was in Philadelphia on Monday after a $22.4 million grant was used to reopen Ladder 1, which would have been the closest fire station had it been operational to serve the Fairmount neighborhood, where 12 people died in a fatal house fire in January 2022
“You're all crazy, you're all crazy, I love you for that,” the president said. “All my friends have become police officers, firefighters or priests, and here I am,” he said, laughing.
The president then recalled the January 2022 fire that killed 12 people in Philadelphia's Fairmount neighborhood, including nine children.
A Christmas tree in the terraced house, which had been converted into apartments, caught fire.
“If the company had not been dismantled, Ladder One would have been the truck closest to the fire,” Biden said. “God only knows if they could have gotten there that much sooner to save lives, would have responded and maybe saved lives.”
“And starting today, for the first time in almost 15 years, this neighborhood will once again have a ladder company available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year to keep them safe,” Biden said. “I kept my promise and got the job done.”
Two additional stations in Philadelphia, Engine 6 and Ladder 11, will also reopen with the help of the SAFER Grant dollars.
The dollars will be used to pay firefighter salaries and benefits.
“I think the most frightening thing anyone can do is be caught in a fire,” the president also said. “Almost everything else has less consequence.”