S.C. Department Cleans Up After Fire in Station

FLORENCE, S.C. -- Florence firefighters will be back into and responding from Station No. 3 on Edisto Drive after an unattended cooking fire destroyed their kitchen and damaged their day room Tuesday.

"One of our employees violated one of our fire safety tips that we're out teaching everyday and left something in the kitchen -- absent minded for a little bit -- and the end result is we had a fire in our kitchen," Randall Osterman, Florence Fire Chief, said.

The fire broke out about 6:30 p.m. as a firefighter prepared dinner, thought he had turned the heat off to go talk to a visitor but hadn't gotten the heat off, Osterman said.

The fire was contained and extinguished by the crew at the station, Osterman said. Station No. 3's crew moved to Station No. 4 -- at the intersection of Palmetto Street and David McLeod Boulevard -- for the night.

"We'd like to get a little benefit out of this, we don't like live demonstrations at our stations," Osterman said. "The public needs to understand -- here we had a fire, we had three trained firefighters, all the fire equipment that we would need and in a matter of minutes we suffered a good amount of damage. The average homeowner doesn't have a fire truck sitting in the driveway."

Firefighters Wednesday morning had started cleaning furniture from the dayroom and would handle the rest of the cleanup and kitchen demolition, Osterman said.

Rebuilding the kitchen would be left to a contractor, he said.

A final dollar figure would be up to the insurance company, the chief said.

"We are out there teaching fire safety and we wish all our people followed it," Osterman said.

"We're dealing with that appropriately," Osterman said of the firefighter who was cooking at the time.

McClatchy-Tribune News Service