Neighbours praised for alerting former surgeon and teen children to house fire

A DISGRACED surgeon is clinging to life in hospital with severe burns after his courageous neighbours rescued him and his two teenage children from a fire that ripped through their house overnight.

A DISGRACED surgeon is clinging to life in hospital with severe burns after his courageous neighbours rescued him and his two teenage children from a fire that ripped through their house overnight.

Tony Tan, 53, and his children, a 14-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl, were inside their Chester Hill house when it went up in flames just before 6am.

Mr Tan was taken to hospital with burns to more than 50 per cent of his body. Picture: Bill Hearne

Bathuy Tham, who lives in a separate flat at the rear of the property heard a loud bang woke to discover the front house on fire.

The mother-of-two threw her own children, a seven-year-old and four-year-old, over the back fence to escape the flames.

At the same time, she heard the next door neighbours desperately banging on the front door of the front house to wake its occupants.

Mr Tan and his children were able to get out of the house but Mr Tan suffered burns to more than 50 per cent of his body. The teenagers were uninjured.

The man’s son and neighbours hosed him down as soon as he escaped from the house. Picture: Bill Hearne

Fire and Rescue NSW Fire Inspector Brad Smith said when ambulance and Fire and Rescue NSW crews arrived, within five minutes of the call-out, they found neighbours and Mr Tans’ son hosing him down.

Mr Tan was intubed due to damage to his airway, placed in an induced coma and taken to Concord Burns Unit.

Mr Tan appeared to be slipping in and out of consciousness. Picture: Bill Hearne

“At 10 to six this morning we received numerous triple-0 calls to a house fire in Chester Hill, they sent six fire engines from the local fire brigades from the area around,” he said.

“They were confronted with a fire in advanced stage. A search and rescue found one gentlemen with burns to a large part of his body.”

The teenagers escaped uninjured.

Fire crews extinguished the blaze by 8.30am.

It damaged more than 40 per cent of the single-storey red brick home. Aerial footage showed the back of the house charred black with a caved-in roof.

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Ms Tham, whose husband had left for work an hour before the fire broke out, said it was a terrifying experience.

“I was so scared,” she said. “I had to put the bin up to the back fence and look to see over before I put my kids over the other side.”

Six fire crews worked to extinguish the blaze. Picture: Bill Hearne

Fire investigators and police crime scene investigators searching the scene. Preliminary findings indicate the fire was cause from an electrical fault in the kitchen.

Mr Tan was a cosmetic surgeon before being deregistered by health authorities after a tribunal found him guilty of professional misconduct over a July 2014 incident at his Fairfield clinic.

He was found to have been performing liposuction on the neck of a patient when he gave himself the powerful drug Propofol and fell asleep for at least an hour during surgery.