Charleston fire chief retiring to help department ‘heal’

By BRUCE SMITH - The Associated Press

CHARLESTON — Rusty Thomas, the plainspoken fire chief who became Charleston’s public face after nine firefighters died in a furniture-store blaze last year, will leave the post next month.

“The Charleston Fire Department has been my life for 32 years,” Thomas said Wednesday in a short statement to reporters, explaining that retirement will allow him to spend more time with his family. “For 16 of those 32 years, I put the department before my family.” He took no questions.

Earlier, in a letter to Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., Thomas said retiring is “the best thing I can do right now to help this department that I love so much heal from the tragedy of June 18.”

A third-generation firefighter, Thomas knew each man who died in the Sofa Super Store fire last June. During a memorial service last year, he delivered intensely personal eulogies peppered with anecdotes and jokes about each one, mimicking their mannerisms and sayings and moving thousands of mourners to laughter and tears.

After the fire, union officials and consultants raised questions about the department’s outmoded procedures and equipment and whether the men died needlessly. State workplace safety regulators fined the department, and numerous analyses have either been issued or are being prepared for release — including a long-awaited study by a city-commissioned panel that is to be made public today.

The same panel made more than 200 recommendations for the department last year — everything from changing uniform fabric to hiring more officers — and many of the changes have been implemented.

Through the criticism, Riley has defended Thomas, his chief since 1992. The praise continued this week.

“You did everything in your power to fight that terrible fire and protect our firefighters. Without your efforts, more lives could have been lost. Since then, you helped us mourn, care for the families of our heroes and at the same time worked to lead our fire department in new initiatives,” Riley said in a letter responding to the chief’s intent to retire effective June 27.

Riley said Wednesday he met with Thomas a day earlier and didn’t try to talk him out of retiring. The mayor said he hopes to have a replacement in four months and said the retirement should not be seen as holding Thomas responsible for the fire deaths.

“The easy thing in a complicated tragedy is to find a scapegoat,” Riley said.

Roger Yow, head of the city’s firefighter union, said word of the retirement caught him by surprise, but he added it seemed inevitable.

“There’s no winners in all this,” he said. “Personally, I think it was the right thing to do, but our main focus is trying to work with the city and moving forward and bringing our Fire Department up to what it should be.”

“I think the majority of firefighters felt like this had to happen to move forward, but I can’t speak for every one of them,” Yow said.

A draft of a federal report on the fire made public last week faulted the department for lacking enough hoses and water pressure to properly fight the fire. It also painted a picture of chaos during which the store’s showroom went from seemingly clear to a smoke-filled maze of sofas, tables and other furniture as hoses burst and firefighters ran into each other.

The city-commissioned report due out today is expected to contain similar details but, like other reports, will not pinpoint a cause of the fire, said J. Gordon Routley, chairman of the review committee. Store workers have said they smoked cigarettes on a loading dock between the store’s showroom and warehouse, and the federal report out last week noted that 28 one-gallon cans of solvents were found in that area.