Aftermath: Con Ed on Track, Hero Story

We were so close to a happy ending.

In our last and hopefully final update in the tale of a dark week in Scarsdale's history, we went from 70 customers without power this morning at 8:00 a.m. to merely one left tonight at a 9:00 p.m. update.

Con Ed believes that lone outage is due to an internal issue, because the neighbors al have power, and they've deemed it a "lights not working" case.

This morning along Post Rd. near the Eastchester border, crews from a Virginia electric company organized and planned out their day, tackling the continuing 10 outages that continued in the Edgewood and Eastchester border area.

At the edge of that gathering stood 912 Post Rd., windows on the 2nd floor boarded over, remnants of a fire yesterday that left one rescuer – the first responder in fact, who just happened upon the fire – seriously injured.

Some insist that no good deed goes unpunished, and that philosophy certainly held true in the case of David Raizen, the president of the Scarsdale Volunteer Ambulance Corps (SVAC). He "just happened" to be driving, according to the fire department, when he came across the house ablaze around 3:00 p.m.

It was the third storm-related structure fire since Saturday, and was directly related to an "improper generator connection at the main panel" which led the wiring in the private two-story home to overheat and cause a "catastrophic failure
 of a power strip" in the second-floor bedroom.

Firefighters from Scarsdale and the FAST team from Hartsdale tended to the blaze and confined it to the area of origin,  but not before the extensive heat and smoke had reached throughout the second floor and was inhaled by two inhabitants of the home. The two residents were transported swiftly to White Plains Hospital-Medical Center and were treated for smoke inhalation and released.

As the first responder, Raizen stayed on hand after driving by the house to help incoming units with important updates on his SVAC portable radio. 

He managed to talk one of the home's occupants into not re-entering the home to rescue her cat (who is now deceased) and had to forcibly pull her back in her attempts to mount the stairs to the second floor, which is so structurally compromised it has rendered the house inoccupable.

After the incident with the occupant, he ran up the driveway to "shut off the temporary generator, at which time he tripped and fell over a loop of wire running from the generator to the basement window," according to a report from the fire department.

Although he didn't think it was serious at first, he has since been diagnosed with a fractured foot. An orthoedist will determine whether surgery will be called for.

Despite the spill, Raizen stayed on the scene, and supervised and coordinated SVAC's operations, including transporting the victims and re-efforting a rescue of the cat. 

Raizen – while he accepts risk at the call of duty – is just another example of the kind of everyday heroes that allowed the village to survive the worst storm of the past two decades without casualty.