HERO workmen ran towards a burning building to help people living inside escape a fire which ripped through a tenement block on Glasgow’s south side this morning.

Vincent Yearsley and Chris Vale, engineers for Openreach, were working on the corner of Skirving Street, in Shawlands, when they noticed a strange smell.

Speaking to The Evening Times Vincent said: “I turned to Chris and said ‘can you smell incense?’ And then we noticed there was smoke coming out of the flat.”

The two men ran over to the four storey tenement and began alerting residents to the smoke billowing out of the first floor flat.

Read more: Shawlands fire: Glasgow South Side neighbour's terrifying ordeal

“We ran over and initially banged on the first window on the ground floor, and then banged on the second window,” Vincent said.

“The guy didn’t really know what was going on, he was in his pyjamas and just like ‘what, what’s going on?’”.

Risking their own safety the men pushed the front door to the building and found it was open and went inside.

Vincent said: “It wasn’t smoky downstairs, but as I was going in the woman (who lives in the flat that was ablaze) was coming out her flat.

“She literally came out, she just had a doll with no head in her hand, she was in her pyjamas and her face was black, just covered in soot.

“Chris helped her across the road. She was quite distressed when the fire brigade turned up they gave her one of those foil blankets.

“She was screaming at us before they arrived.”

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Chris added: “She was screaming at me asking why we’re not helping her, and if we were the fire service. We tried to calm her down.”

The woman was attended to by emergency services and taken away by an ambulance shortly after, the men said.

Before the fire crews arrived the men spotted another neighbour in the window of a second floor flat.

“We were just shouting to him, ‘get out, you need to get out’, and he was saying he couldn’t and he was trapped,” Vincent said. There was also a dog trapped in the top floor flat.”

Vincent helped the man from the ground floor flat out from the lobby into the street.

“I offered him my hat and coat, it was freezing and it was raining and he was just in his pyjamas, you know,” Vincent said.

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Once fire crews brought the flames under control the man on the second floor and the dog were led to safety.

Vincent said: “They got the fire under control quite quickly and the dog came out after that, the dog was on the top floor above the fire. It was quite a relief when they got the dog out.”

The men said a friend of one of the residents came over and thanked them for helping to get people out and giving the man his coat and hat.

“All we did was help people out from the landing really and I gave the guy my coat,” Vincent said.

Emergency services were called to Skirving Street around 8.30 am Wednesday to reports of a fire in a "four-storey tenement".

The fire broke out in a first floor flat and two other neighbours were in the building at the time, as well as a dog in an upstairs flat. 

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Fire crews arrived on the scene quickly and extinguished the flames by 9.30 am.

Skirving Street, in between Deanston Drive and Tantallon Road remained closed off by police for sometime. 

As of 5 pm Police Scotland said the evacuated neighbours have been allowed back to their homes.