By Jason Del Rey
Newsday
COMMACK, N.Y. — Commack Fire Department Chief Salvatore Formica didn’t have the luxury of seeing where he was going. Smoke enveloped him. Flames banked above. And a fellow firefighter told him an elderly woman was alive in the kitchen, just one room away. So Formica dropped to his knees and crept forward.
Eventually, he felt her. He gripped her under the arms and didn’t have time to consider whether he was taking part in a rescue or a recovery.
Then the woman let out a moan and the answer was clear. This was a rescue.
Formica pulled the woman outside, where she was treated by medics and flown to Stony Brook University Medical Center. The woman, Mary Feltham, 78, survived the fire that tore through her home on Walter Court on Sunday night, but was in critical condition yesterday, a hospital spokesman said.
“It’s semi-insane to go into a house without water,” said Formica, 42, who arrived on the scene before any fire trucks arrived. He spoke outside his house yesterday afternoon, surrounded by his wife and three children. “But it changes your outlook a little when you find out all the details: There’s a little old lady, she lives alone and neighbors know she’s home. I had to go in.”
“It’s going to be day by day,” one of her sons, who wanted to be identified only as Tim, said outside the badly damaged home yesterday.
He said things could have been worse for the retired schoolteacher if not for Formica and others.
A few minutes before the rescue, Formica was in his home two blocks away when his pager went off about 8:30 p.m. Multiple calls of a house fire, it read, and he saw it was a nearby address. Formica drove to the scene, where billowing smoke filled the night sky.
A few moments earlier, a neighbor, Howard Ross, 56, had called 911, then had run outside just as the fire mushroomed. “Within a short period of time, the front windows blew out,” he said. “Then it was like an inferno.”
Former Commack chief Robert Jinks, who also lives in the neighborhood, was the first person to try to rescue Feltham, Formica said, although he didn’t have his air pack. He told Formica that he saw a woman moving inside, so the chief, who had an air pack, went in.
He dragged Feltham to the front lawn, where medics took over. Formica was uninjured.
His day was far from over. He went on to Brooklyn for his overnight shift as a detective with the New York Police Department Emergency Services Unit.
Formica has been a hero before. In 1997, he and another officer aided a city firefighter after a shard of glass fell from a burning building in midtown Manhattan and partly severed the firefighter’s spinal cord. That firefighter still calls Formica to update him on his rehabilitation.
And in 2000, Formica and three other Commack firefighters pulled a woman out of a house fire, although she died later.
Yesterday, the drama of their father’s previous night only strengthened Formica’s two sons’ desire to follow his path to be a volunteer firefighter. “In four years,” said his oldest child, Thomas, 14, “I’m joining.”
Copyright 2007 Newsday, Inc.