‘You just do what you were trained to do’: vols share details of life-saving rescue from burning Riverhead home

Their heart rates have not yet returned to normal.

The four Riverhead firefighters who rescued an unconscious man from a burning home on Middle Road late last night recalled the dark, smoke-filled living room where volunteer firefighter J.R. Renten discovered the victim lying face-down on a sofa.

The room was pitch black, save for lights from their flashlights and the glow of a circular flourescent tube hanging over a small bar. It was filled with thick smoke from the blaze that apparently started on the kitchen stove.

Renten and fellow search-team firefighters, Steve Beal, Kevin Burgess and Tony Chiaramonte, entered the two-family dwelling on Middle Road crawling on hands and knees. Renten was out front and shouted “Victim! Victim!” into his radio microphone as soon as he ascertained that the form on the couch — which he at first thought might be a large white pillow — was actually a person.

“It’s something you practice for,” Beal said. “But until you’re actually in the situation, you just don’t know.”

The four men — three veterans of the department, including an ex-chief and two ex-captains and a relatively new vol who joined RFD in June 2013 — pulled the unconscious, unresponsive 30-year-old Matej Petrak out of the burning house.

It wasn’t easy.

They dragged Petrak — “a large man” — through the first floor of the house to safety via a rear door. An exit door from the living room where the victim was discovered was blocked by the couch where he lay, so they had to get him out of the house by way of the rear door from which they entered. They worked crawling on their hands and knees in order to stay beneath the thick, dense cloud of black smoke that enveloped the apartment after the stove in the first-floor kitchen caught fire just before 11:30 last night.

The rescue was the first time in decades Riverhead firefighters pulled a living victim from a house fire, First Assistant Chief Kevin Brooks said. They got it done in less than two minutes, he said.

Petrak, suffering from smoke inhalation, was brought by Riverhead Volunteer Ambulance Corps to Peconic Bay Medical Center, where a Suffolk Police Medevac helicopter was waiting, He was airlifted by Suffolk Police to Stony Brook, but weather conditions deteriorated, forcing the helicopter to land at Islip MacArthur airport, a Suffolk County Police spokesperson said this morning.

A Stony Brook University Hospital spokesperson said today the hospital had no record of Petrak at the hospital, but Riverhead fire marshal David Andruskiewicz confirmed this afternoon the victim was transported there last night.

“We hope he makes a full recovery,” Brooks said today.

“You know, you do your training to be prepared for an incident like this,” Renten said. But nothing prepares a firefighter for this, they said.

“You just do what you’re trained to do and you do it automatically — without even thinking,” Renten said.