Fire chief takes unusual route to job
Everyone remembers his first.
For Gregory Bulanow, it was on Hugo Avenue in the Union Heights neighborhood of North Charleston.
He was awakened in the middle of the night to help put out a blaze.
"Zero visibility," he remembers. "Stuff all over the floor."
Once the fire was extinguished, the smoke cleared, the firefighters found trash bags of clothes and other things. The person was a hoarder, Bulanow figures.
"So that was a bit unusual," he says.
But no one was hurt. Everybody turned out OK.
The chief
A North Charleston firefighter since 1996, Bulanow became the city's fire chief Sunday, taking over for the recently retired Leonard Judge.
Bulanow took an uncommon route to his post, arriving at the fire business from a different turn. He always assumed he'd become a professor.
Standing 6-foot-6, Bulanow played varsity volleyball and concentrated on English and history at Cedarville University, a Baptist school east of Dayton, Ohio.
"My goal was that I would continue on to grad school, probably teach at college," he says. "But I wanted to take a break after my bachelor's degree and move as far away from an academic environment as I could. I felt burned out."
The fire service appealed to Bulanow. He sought an exciting career, one that would be engaging and altruistic.
"The desire to help is very strong," says Bulanow, a native of Greendale, Wis., near Milwaukee. "I was never a person motivated by money, and so I was looking for something active."
He had met his wife, Jacqueline, their first weekend of college in 1991 — they sat next to each other in the school cafeteria — and married four years later. Together, they moved to Charleston, where she worked as a nurse and Bulanow as a waiter at the Omni Hotel at Charleston Place.
Bulanow spied a fire department ad in the newspaper and was brought in with a fairly large rookie class. His first assignment: Station 3 on Remount Road.
By '99, he had made engineer, two years later, captain, and in 2006, battalion chief.
"I felt extremely fortunate to be in the fire department," he says.
Preventing fires
When Bulanow moved into an administrative role, he was charged with an essential task: the prevention of fire.
He started a smoke detector program. "In a way, it's very simple," Bulanow says. "We got smoke alarms — let's go put those up."
But the plan took nine months to develop, as the North Charleston Fire Department identified and targeted specific areas to conduct smoke alarm sweeps. Then firefighters went door to door installing detectors.
They bought into the idea, no easy chore.
"A lot of these guys, they get into the fire service because they want to kick down doors, drag in hoses and fight fires," Bulanow says.
The program is credited with saving more than 20 lives during seven fire-related incidents since March 2006, Bulanow says.
At one point, North Charleston firefighters installed more than 1,000 smoke alarms in a 60-day period. More than 4,000 smoke detectors have been installed. The program also won an award and $5,000 grant from the National Fire Protection Association.
Bulanow is grateful to his guys.
"I don't know if they'll ever know how much I appreciate that," he says.
Before and after
Prevention weighs on Bulanow's mind now more than ever, given the fatal Sofa Super Store blaze on June 18, 2007, an event that separates time, before and after the fire.
Bulanow, 36, and his family — Jacqueline and young daughters Lucinda and Nadia — live in West Ashley, not far from the site of the store.
"I found out about it that night," Bulanow says. "By the time I got there, the building had already collapsed."
He didn't know the nine firefighters who died, but many times once people find out what Bulanow does, they start talking, telling him stories about their favorite firefighters. He knows: They were well-loved, terrific guys.
"Six of them died from one station about a mile and a half from my house," Bulanow says. "They were my firefighters in a way because these were the guys protecting my house."
Upcoming
Bulanow sees a challenging time ahead. North Charleston, with 218 firefighters, needs three more fire stations and additional staff, he says. Two other fire stations need to be relocated.
"The biggest issues are stations and staffing," he says.
And, of course, prevention. Like medicine, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
"Getting that across to the public ... is just extremely important," he says.
Firefighting has changed much in the past century. In the '50s, the average flashover, when the temperature rises to such a point that every combustible object in a structure bursts into flames, was 12 to 15 minutes. By the '90s, because of new construction and newer materials, the time has dropped to three to seven minutes. The window leaves firefighters little opportunity for rescue.
"That makes prevention that much more important," Bulanow says. "It's critical to be proactive and to identify trends, so prevention efforts can take place."
