Hydro Quebec employees on patrol for power failures rescued three people from a burning house in Hudson on Wednesday morning.

Mario Menard and his partner were driving along Main St. at 6:15 a.m., on the lookout for branches that had brought down electrical lines, when they spotted a red glow coming from a house on Main St.

He realized right away it was a fire.

"When I patrol the line I always open my window so I can see outside," said Menard. "With the window open I heard some screaming. Little children they were screaming, 'Help me, help us, help me.’ so I said to my partner, ‘There is a fire and somebody they're caught in the fire.”

Menard rushed into action.

"Just after that I called right away 9-1-1 and during that time I parked the truck just beside the road and we ran to the house. The people were just outside of the window, one leg outside of the window and the other inside the house and fire around them."

"They were caught on the second floor so we told the little girls – one was eight years old and the other one ten – to jump," said Menard.

"They didn't want to jump but after a few seconds they jumped, and we caught them."

The children were not hurt, but the woman suffered minor injuries when she jumped out the second-floor window.

Menard and his partner brought all three to safety before firefighters got to the house.

By the time firefighters arrived the flames had spread so fast they would not have been able to enter the house to search for people who were trapped.

“Thank God they were here. These guys – yeah, they saved three lives today for sure,” said Daniel Leblanc of the Hudson fire department.

Leblanc said that without the Hydro crew's quick response the family would likely have been hurt or killed by the fire.

Firefighters put out the flames within a few hours, but all they could do was keep the fire from spreading to other buildings.

"There was no way we could actually go inside and do anything safe," said Leblanc.

Nothing remains of the house except a few charred timbers.

Firefighters said the cause of the fire can’t be determined, but that it’s not criminal. The house was built less than ten years ago.

There was no power on at the time of the blaze. The force of the fire blew embers across the street to neighbour Benoit Laporte’s lawn.

“It's pieces of everything that were burning down like meteorites coming from all over the place,” said Laporte, who helped during the rescue. “From where they jumped, it was already all burned down. It was a really big fire and it went really fast.”

Menard and his partner Guy Desgagne returned to the scene of the rescue later Wednesday, haunted by what could have happened.

“I got four kids you know and if something like that happened at my house, I'm going to do the best I can to save them,” he said.

Next-door neighbour Fausto Sabatino said the Hydro workers deserve a medal.

“Superstars definitely. They did all the work. Amazing that they just happened to be driving by. Just lucky,” said Sabatino.