In addition to being volunteer firefighters with the Syosset Fire Department (SFD), Peter Kahl and Jack Randazzo both work locally on behalf of their community - Kahl for the Jericho Water District and Randazzo for the Syosset Fire District. On Saturday afternoon, Aug. 12, Kahl and Randazzo had both recently arrived at their Clearview Village homes from work and each was settling in for what they thought would be a quiet afternoon around the house. Little did they know that in a matter of minutes, they would come together to save a neighbor's home from being completely destroyed by a fast moving kitchen fire.

Just after 3 p.m., Peter Kahl heard an audible home alarm sound and initially thought it was a malfunction of a neighbor's burglar alarm system. But when he went to his front door to check the source of the siren, he saw smoke beginning to bellow from the eaves of the house directly across from his Cambria Road home. He grabbed the cordless phone from his house and followed by his son, he headed towards the house as he called the fire in to the dispatcher on duty at SFD headquarters.

He recalled seeing the woman who lived alone in the house leave about an hour earlier and with no cars in the driveway, his primary focus was attacking the fire directly and minimizing its spread to the rest of the house. He handed the telephone off to his son and instructed him to await the arrival of the fire department units as he sought to make entry into the kitchen area where the fire appeared to have originated. Armed with a garden hose and wearing his street clothes, Kahl forced entry into the burning house via a window and began to attack the fire.

At the same time, Jack Randazzo, Captain of the SFD's Hook & Ladder Co. No. 1, was changing out of his work uniform when his son shouted that there was smoke rising above a house across from their Chadwick Road home. Randazzo suspected it might just be smoke from a neighbor's barbecue but just in case, he asked his son, "Is it white smoke or black smoke?" When his son answered black smoke and told him it was getting worse, Randazzo knew this was no barbecue fire.

He quickly headed around to the house on Cambria Road just as the Syosset dispatcher began to dispatch the alarm over the fire department radio system. He was met in front of the home by Kahl's son, who informed him that his father was in the house with the garden hose trying to fight the fire.

Knowing Kahl had a source of water, Randazzo forced entry through a rear door and after assuring Kahl was okay, Randazzo focused his efforts on ventilating the structure to relieve some of the high heat that had began to build up in the house. He also began to undertake a primary search for any possible victims.

Back in the kitchen area, the extreme heat began to melt a wall-mounted telephone but eventually the fire proved no match for the garden hose. By the time the first SFD units arrived - just minutes into the alarm - Kahl and Randazzo had extinguished almost all of the fire and vented much of the heat and smoke from the building.

SFD Assistant Chief Robert Kaplan commended the pair for their successful team work in confining the majority of the fire damage to just the kitchen area. "Had it not been for Pete and Jack's efforts, the damage to the home would surely have been much more severe," said Chief Kaplan. "This clearly shows the benefits of having over 100 trained volunteer firefighters living right here in the Syosset community they serve."