Hailed for stopping giant blaze, Maine fire chief now accused of starting it himself

Chief told investigators he started fire by accident smoking, except he doesn't smoke

Mr Plummer is charged with arson (AP)

Federal investigators are combing through the career of a Maine fire chief who led efforts to contain a fast-moving brush fire in April only to admit later that he was the one who started it.

Ricky Plummer, 59, was hailed for his part in extinguishing a dangerous blaze that tore through more than 40 acres of tinder-dry marsh grassland on 15 April in the seaside town of Old Orchard Beach that involved some 100 fireman as well as a water-dumping helicopter.

“It was a huge fire going past, like a freight train,” Mr Plummer told a local TV station on the day it happened. The blaze had briefly threatened to consume a local block of flats in the town which lies a few miles north of Kennebunkport on the Maine coast.

But security video footage from cameras at the residential units showed Mr Plummer wandering into nearby woodland and emerging almost 30 minutes later near the time the fire started. That directly contradicted what he had told his own dispatchers about his movements.

Mr Plummer, who was charged with arson on Monday and released on bail, has previously served in fire departments up and down the East Coast and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms is now checking his past assignments against unsolved fires in those states. There are also questions about the destruction by fire of an Old Orchard Beach hotel last year.

“Obviously, we’re doing a case review of any outstanding fire incidents in communities he’s been associated with,” Maine Fire Marshal Joseph Thomas said. “That’s a standard practice. He just happens to be the fire chief in this case.”

“He denies the allegation,” a lawyer for the fireman, Bernard J. Broder, told the Boston Globe.

Mr Plummer has acknowledged he may have started the fire, saying that he had gone into the woods to smoke, contrary to what he had told his dispatcher by radio. But local investigators could find no evidence that he was a smoker or nor did they find any cigarette butts in the area that would have survived a fast-moving blaze.

“Everybody’s stunned,” Michael Tousignant, an Old Orchard Beach town councilor said. “It’s a shock,” adding that the town fire chief had “seemed to be a nice guy” and “had done a nice job”.