We remember

Moving ceremonies honor sacrifice of 9 fallen firefighters

A few hundred mourners gathered Wednesday evening on a scarred and wounded patch of Savannah Highway to light a candle, say a prayer and remember nine firefighters who lost their lives there one year ago.

Behind a chain-link fence and under a hazy blue sky, a long line of Charleston firefighters fanned out across the uneven earth where they had battled a raging inferno in the Sofa Super Store last June. The land was clear now, save for a lone flagpole and nine white wreaths marking where the nine men died.
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'The new normal'

Station 16 deals with the past as life returns to the firehouse

Art Wittner trembled as he sat alone in his garage on a sweltering July afternoon. Sweat rolled down his brow. His hands shook. His brain boiled with images of smoke, flames, destruction.

He could feel himself unraveling by the minute.

One month before, Wittner was aboard one of two fire engines that raced from a West Ashley station house to a growing blaze at the Sofa Super Store on Charleston's Savannah Highway. The trucks carried six men. Wittner, alone, survived. Read More

Cheating death

A trio's lifelong connection: Surviving horror

They call it a brotherhood. Soldiers know it. Firefighters know it. It's a bond that forms when you fight together in a war, see death up close and fear in another man's eyes.

One year after the Sofa Super Store blaze that killed nine Charleston firefighters, three who cheated death that day look back on the tragedy that forever links their lives. Read More

A day that changed Charleston

A lone flagpole juts from the sun-baked dirt and gravel that cover a sprawling, vacant lot in the middle of Savannah Highway's bustling retail corridor. Nine white crosses made from sections of PVC pipe line the sidewalk outside a chain-link fence that rings the site. The massive furnitur... Read More