Florence firefighters will be back into and responding from Station 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 every day and left something in the kitchen — absent minded for a little bit — and the end result is we had a fire in our kitchen,” Florence Fire Chief Randall Osterman said.
The fire broke out about 6:30 p.m. after a firefighter prepared dinner and thought he had turned the heat off to go talk to a visitor, Osterman said. The fire was contained and extinguished by the crew at the station.
Station 3’s crew moved to Station 4, at West Palmetto Street and David H. McLeod Boulevard, for the night, Osterman said.
“We’d like to get a little benefit out of this. We don’t like live demonstrations at our stations,” he 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 will be left to a contractor; a final dollar figure on the damage will come from the insurance company.
“We are out there teaching fire safety and we wish all our people followed it,” Osterman said.
“We’re dealing with that appropriately,” he said of the firefighter who was cooking at the time.
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