On and off throughout Ted Scardino’s 16-year tenure as a senior IT staffer at Nixon Peabody’s Rochester, New York, office, the 49-year-old has served as a volunteer firefighter in the suburbs east of the city.
When a call came in around 5:30 a.m. last Christmas Eve, he jumped out of bed and rushed to put out a car and house fire near the shore of Lake Ontario. What should have been a routine call turned catastrophic when Scardino and three fellow volunteers arrived on the scene. What happened next has led to a new and unlikely role for the soft-spoken technologist: as a public policy advocate on Capitol Hill.
