'Not Going To Watch Somebody's House Burn Down:’ Couple Recounts Heroic Response To Neighbors' Burning Home

LIDO BEACH, NY. — For Jacquie and Kevin Cahlil, Monday was shaping up like a normal day at the beach with their golden retriever, Oliver. The married couple were walking Oliver across the dunes early Monday afternoon when Kevin, a now-retired 28-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department, smelled something in the wind. From his near three decades of firefighting experience, Cahlil said, he knew it was a building fire.

“You could smell the siding burning, it wasn’t a normal smell. It was the insulation, it’s not a regular smell," Kevin said.

"I kept saying to him, ‘it’s probably a fireplace,’ and he said, ‘No, I know the difference in the smoke,'” Jacquie added.

After examining the area from an elevated lookout point, neither Kevin nor Jacquie could make out where the smokey smell was coming from. Only after they drove back to their Lido Boulevard home did they see it: The fire was at the house across the street, on Biarritz Street. From there, both Jacquie and Kevin sprang into action, dialing 911 before they had even parked the car and helping stop a fire that drew the response of 50 firefighters.

“We smelt it, and then as we made the turn around the block I saw it. So he actually came through the red light, put the car in, and he ran while we were on the phone with 911," Jacquie said.

The 28-year FDNY veteran was able to relay to a 911 dispatcher the address of the fire, the location of the blaze within the house, and that he had firefighting experience. From there, Kevin crossed the six-lane road to see where the blaze was, ultimately locating it in the rear of the house by its chimney. After finding that the two residents of the house wanted to get their cat out of the building, Kevin and another civilian responder attempted to connect a garden hose to start dousing the flames. At this point, however, the responders ran into an equipment issue.

“The other guy was going to turn the water on, he’s hooking [the hose] up, and I hear, ‘ch-ch-ch,’ and I go, ‘It’s frozen!’ The thing was filled with water, and they left it in the garage. So I go, ‘nah, this ain’t going to work," Kevin said.

Meanwhile, Jacquie crossed back over the six lanes of traffic on Lido Boulevard to get fire extinguishers from their home. “They’re not light,” she joked.

“The hose was useless...With that, I ran back here and got — they have no fire extinguishers — I got my fire extinguishers, we have tons, I have fire extinguishers everywhere. So I grabbed two of the fire extinguishers and ran back across,” Jacquie continued.

By that time, Kevin had figured out a new way to stop the blaze, spotting a burning piece of ventilation duct hanging out from the side of the house.

“I didn’t want to do anything until I knew I could do something with water or extinguishers. I noticed, when I went in the house, there was a steel shovel on the front stoop. So, I grabbed the shovel, and, by that time the exhaust unit was hanging out. It was a big [piece of] ductwork for the fireplace, it was hanging out by the ductwork. It had flex duct, so it had fallen out. It burned out of whatever was holding it,” Kevin said. “I had the extinguishers there, so I knew I was going to be able to do something as soon as it got out, so I took the shovel — it was sharp, one of those straight-edged metal ones — and what I did was, where the flex was, I just kept hitting it. I got through one, and I got through the other. The whole thing fell out on the ground.”

Once the burning piece of ductwork was on the ground, the former firefighter was able to spray the burnt area down with the fire extinguishers Jacquie had brought over.

“The cool thing is it didn’t get into the house; they didn’t lose the house. That was my biggest worry, ‘It’s going to get into the house, into...the common space between the living room and the attic.’ I went over there, I looked, it charred the wood good, it charred all around it, it got up into the siding and everything, but it never got into the house. It stayed right outside.”

Ring camera footage from the couple’s house shows them arriving home at 2 p.m. Monday, getting out of the car while on the phone with a 911 dispatcher. In the background of the footage, the smoke emanating from the Biarritz Street home is visible.

(Credit: Kevin Cahlil Via Ring) Kevin Cahlil, seen crossing the street, approaches the site of the Biarritz Street fire.

For Jacquie, the experience gave her a rare chance to see her husband doing the kind of work he had done for almost 30 years in Manhattan.

“30 years on the fire department but I never saw him in action. I saw pictures of him, but I never physically saw him in action,” Jacquie said. “He didn’t even think. And I’m yelling at him, ‘You have no apparatus on, get away from that fire, you’re burnable!’ And he just jumped into action like it was yesterday.”

The only other time Jacquie had seen her husband in action, the Lido beach resident said, was when he put out a kitchen fire in their home with an extinguisher. When asked if it ever crossed their minds to not cross the street, waiting instead for fire departments to arrive and handle the fire themselves, both Jacquie and Kevin had the same answer.

“No,” the husband and wife duo said.

“I don’t need the recognition, I’m just glad that the people were out, they’re safe, the house is still there, and they’ll be back in there, is everything will be fine…It’s one of those things where we were in the right place at the right time and I could help," Kevin said. "I’m not going to stand here and watch somebody’s house burn down. The people were out, that was our first safety [goal]. I could go inside and look, it was perfectly clear in there. [I said], 'Alright, let’s go outside and see what we can do.'"