He wishes he could have saved them.

The only East Harlem resident to pick up a phone and warn Con Ed when he smelled a gas leak first noticed an odor the night before the deadly explosion — and is devastated that he waited too long to call.

“I never thought it could end up like this,” said Corey Louire, 32, one of several area residents to admit smelling the leak but the only one who took action.

“I feel terrible for all those people that lost their lives. I never imagined anything like this could ever happen,” the dad of two said.

Louire, who lives on the second floor of a building one door down from the scene, first noticed a strong smell of gas in his bedroom late Tuesday night.

“I started smelling the odor of gas the night before, in my apartment,” he said.

“My fiancé also smelled it. I said, ‘Let me go downstairs and figure out what is going on,’ ” he recalled. “This was late at night.”

“I went downstairs, and it did smell a little. I thought it might be coming from out there,” he said, referring to the two buildings, 1644 and 1646 Park Ave., where eight people were killed in Wednesday’s blast.

“But when I went back upstairs, my fiancé had opened the bedroom window a crack, and the smell wasn’t as strong.”

Asked why he didn’t immediately alert Con Ed, Louire said it wasn’t the first time he noticed the odor.

“We’ve smelled gas before, and nothing ever happened,” he said, his voice breaking. “I didn’t want to make a call, and then it’s just a false alarm.”

When he woke up, at around 7 a.m., the odor was still there.

“We started getting the children ready for school,” he said of the couple’s two boys, 11 and 3. “Everything is still pretty hectic in the mornings, but I still smelled gas in my bedroom, the same as the night before.

“At that moment, I thought, I needed to take action.”

As he took his youngest to preschool, Louire said he called his superintendent, leaving a message on voicemail about the smell.

Then, instead of heading to work, he went back home.

“Something in me said, ‘Do not go to work. Get back home and take more action,’ ” he recalled.

From home, he called his mother, then his fiancé’s mother, for advice.

“If you feel so bad, call 911,” he said his mom told him.

“Call Con Ed,” said his fiancé’s mother.

“I called the super again, but he didn’t pick up,” Louire said. “I also knocked on his door.”

Then “I got the phone number for Con Ed and hit the prompt to report a gas leak.”

By then, it was 9:13 a.m.

Don’t use your cellphone, a Con Ed operator told him. Don’t turn on any appliances. Just get out of your apartment.

“I still wasn’t aware it could turn into anything like what happened,” Louire said.

He was waiting in the lobby for Con Ed workers when the buildings blew up at around 9:30 a.m.

“All I did was hear a boom, and I heard glass shatter,” he said.

“Then I ran across the street and saw the smoke. I was in shock mode. I went back the other way, and I saw the whole building go down, and I lost it.”

Louire wasn’t the only one to underestimate the odor’s significance.

The pregnant wife of fatal victim Jordy Salas has said that on the night before, she, too, smelled gas but made no calls because the odor went away.

Neighbor Armando Ramos, 55, said he smelled gas six days earlier but made no calls because “I had no idea there would be an explosion.”

“There were many times I would pass by on 116th and Park Avenue and smell gas,” he said.

Con Ed says the last report of a gas smell in either of the collapsed buildings was in May. Fire officials say they haven’t had an emergency gas call in the neighborhood in four years.