By Ron Menchaca and Glenn Smith
The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)
CHARLESTON, SC — The announcement that the top candidates for the Charleston fire chief’s job will be revealed at week’s end has set off a fresh flurry of speculation as to who made the final list of seven.
Charleston Mayor Joe Riley is expected to name Friday those in the running to replace former Fire Chief Rusty Thomas, who retired in June, a year after the Sofa Super Store fire that killed nine of his men. The top candidates are scheduled to be in Charleston on Monday to meet with city leaders, firefighters and residents.
While the selection process has been shrouded in secrecy, the few details that have surfaced indicate the finalists for the job are all men and currently hold the position of chief or deputy chief at a fire department in a city as large as or larger than Charleston. Sources familiar with the final slate of candidates say the top applicants hail from Florida, North Carolina, Maryland, Alabama, Missouri and Ohio.
The Post and Courier contacted chiefs and deputy chiefs in roughly two dozen cities in those states. Most said their departments had either not fielded candidates or they didn’t know.
One official mentioned as a possible finalist is Jamie Geer, chief of the Clearwater, Fla., fire and rescue department. Geer, a 33-year fire service veteran, declined to say Tuesday whether he is a candidate because he doesn’t want to affect the integrity of the selection process.
Another name that has been mentioned already has familiarity with the Charleston Fire Department. After the sofa store fire, Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service Chief Thomas W. Carr Jr. invited some of Charleston’s commanders to attend incident command training in Maryland. The Maryland department declined to comment on Carr’s plans.
Others have speculated that Charleston may tap the same pool of finalists who vied for the fire chief’s job in Wilmington, N.C., a historic port city. Some Wilmington firefighters say they wouldn’t be surprised if two finalists for the Wilmington job were eyeing Charleston. They are Larry Collins, a former chief in Dayton, Ohio, and Robert Ridgeway, who led the fire department in West Palm Beach, Fla. Neither could be reached for comment.
The guessing has been intense in local firefighting circles since the city launched the national search this summer. But a number of supposed candidates, from a top female chief in Georgia to the head of the nation’s fire administration, have not checked out. Tim Sendelbach, a member of the six-member expert panel that studied the sofa store fire, was rumored to be a strong candidate. But Sendelbach said last week that he hadn’t even applied for the job.
Rich Granger, the Charlotte Fire Department’s deputy chief for administration, had the same response when asked about his supposed interest in the job. “No, sir. I’m not even in a position to apply.”
Stephen R. McInerny II, an assistant chief with Fort Lauderdale (Fla.) Fire-Rescue Department, had not been mentioned as a possible candidate. But he was in the running until he was cut from the pool of contenders late last month.
Shreveport (La.) Fire Chief Brian Crawford, who also served on the sofa store fire review panel, said he doesn’t know who’s on the short list in Charleston. But he understands the nail-biting, soul-searching stress the finalists are likely going through.
Crawford, a finalist for fire chief jobs in Dallas and Irving, Texas, before landing the top spot in Shreveport, said there’s a good chance the finalists have spent most or all of their careers in the same department, which means they would have to pick up their lives and families and relocate to an unfamiliar city.
The selection process will be a two-way street, and candidates will be sizing up the situation in Charleston as much as the city will be screening them, Crawford said. “It’s one thing to come up through the ranks in a department. It’s a totally different dynamic when you move to a new organization.”
Copyright 2008, The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)