Memorial work begins at Sofa Super Store fire site

Brad Nettles // The Post and Courier

Gary Fulford with the city of Charleston Parks Department loads a section of the old Sofa Super Store asphalt parking lot into a truck Wednesday morning as a fire truck passes on Savannah Highway. The site is where nine firefighters were killed in 2007.

As the four-year anniversary of the Sofa Super Store disaster approaches, the city is working to turn the site into a more fitting memorial for the nine Charleston firefighters who died there.

Long-term plans for a permanent memorial and fire department building where the Sofa Super Store once stood are unfunded and years away, but in the meantime Charleston will create a grass-covered, landscaped site with unique memorial markers for the nine, replacing what is now a parking lot and field where nine simple markers hold small flags.

The $45,000 cost for improving the memorial site will be a mix of city money and donated funds. Site work is set to began this week.

"What we're doing is creating a more handsome memorial site there that will have the nine flags and have it ready for the fourth anniversary this June," Mayor Joe Riley said Wednesday.

The plan calls for regrading the site, laying down sod with an irrigation system and a perimeter hedge, installing a lighted 25-foot flag pole with a marker explaining what happened there, and laying a crushed granite path from the parking area to the flagpole.

The flagpole will be circled by benches, and the newly landscaped site will feature unique markers placed where each of the nine firefighters died. The markers, which are being created by a firefighter in Virginia, will feature the patterned aluminum common on firefighting equipment.

Firefighter Donny Boyd volunteered to create the markers, each of which will serve as a holder for a flag and flowers, according to Don Brown, director of the city's Capital Projects Division.

The improvements, officially dubbed "The Charleston Nine Interim Memorial Enhancements," will be completed by June 1, Brown said.

The June 18, 2007, fire at the furniture store claimed the lives of firefighters Mike Benke, Billy Hutchinson, Louis Mulkey, Mark Kelsey, Brad Baity, Michael French, Earl Drayton, Brandon Thompson and Melvin Champaign. It was the nation's worst loss of firefighters' lives since the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade Center.

In the Sofa Super Store blaze, a loading dock fire spread through the building filled with highly combustible furniture. The cause was never determined, although investigators have said a carelessly discarded cigarette likely was to blame.

A series of studies and investigations into the fire faulted the store's practices and the Charleston Fire Department's training, tactics and leadership. The city spent more than $8 million on improvements to the department in the years that followed.

The final report of the National Institute of Standards and Technology this month called for national building and fire codes to require sprinklers for all new commercial retail furniture stores regardless of size, and for existing retail furniture stores with any single display area of greater than 2,000 square feet.

In 2008, the city bought the West Ashley site on U.S. Highway 17, also known as the Charleston Nine Memorial Highway, for $1.85 million.

The long-term plan for the site calls for a large, new building that would surround a permanent memorial garden on three sides. The building would be 25,000 to 32,000 square feet, with space for firefighter training, public education programs and a new headquarters for the Charleston Fire Department.

Riley said the next step in plans for a permanent memorial will be selecting a landscape architect firm. The city plans to build the permanent memorial as funds become available, and later construct the new Fire Department building around the memorial.