Fire chief prepares to pass the torch of public safety

When Lee Whitehurst, chief of the East Manatee Fire Rescue District, retires in January 2027 after a decade on the job, he’ll have spent 48 of his 62 years in the firefighting business. Actually, it’s been quite a spell since Whitehurst has fought actual fires. He reckons the last time he went out on a call was for a Myakka City brush fire in 2008. 

Because Lakewood Ranch composes a major part of his district, there aren’t many fires to fight. The homes and buildings are too new, too well constructed. But that’s not the way East Manatee was back in the late 1970s when Whitehurst’s career was in its nascent stage. There were plenty of places that were apt to catch fire, from old wooden homes to brush fields. 

Whitehurst got his first taste of the trade at age 14. “I was mowing yards in the summer to make a little extra money when I saw this big cloud of smoke coming up from down the road,” he recalls. Whitehurst bicycled toward the plumes, where he found an old house burning. The Samoset Volunteer Fire Department was using the blaze for a training exercise. “Then I noticed these kids in oversized gear holding a hose that was squirting water on the fire,” he says. “They were junior firemen. I immediately joined Explorer Post 48 as a cadet, part of the Manatee County Fire Service.”

He’s been a firefighter — either volunteer or professional — ever since.

Working out of a 20-acre main campus on Lakewood Ranch Boulevard, Whitehurst currently oversees a force that includes 19 administrative personnel and 123 firefighter/rescuers in 10 stations.

The East Manatee Fire Rescue District is named purposefully to place the emphasis on rescue. Each firefighter is a licensed emergency medical technician (EMT) and can handle basic life support, like administering epinephrine for severe allergic reactions or Narcan for drug overdoses. The department does not transport people to the hospital, but because it has twice as many vehicles as the county has ambulances, “we tend to get there sooner, and begin life support,” Whitehurst says. 

Then there is the litany of ad hoc emergencies that don’t fall under a firefighter’s purview. They include snakes or alligators in pools and horses stuck in the mud. The firefighters show up and help people get in touch with the appropriate agencies to rectify the problems. “We get these kinds of calls and, I mean, we’re not gonna not go,” the chief says. 

‘Like gold’ 

Lee Whitehurst was born in the same hospital — Manatee Memorial — and went to the same grade school — Samoset Elementary — as his mother. His father ran a landscaping business. “I would say we were lower middle class,” he says. 

Lee first felt the thrill of fire rescue when as a pre-teen he fell under the thrall of the 1970s TV show “Emergency.” Then came that fateful cloud of smoke while mowing lawns. Whitehurst recalls the time when, at age 16, he alone accompanied an inexperienced Samoset volunteer to a brush fire. “He could drive the truck, but that was it,” Whitehurst recalls. “I did the codes over the radios, cranked up the pump for him. I wasn’t allowed to fight the fire, though.”

Photo by Dex Honea

That came two years later. Whitehurst attended Southeast High School, where he lettered in wrestling. As soon as he turned 18, he became a full-fledged Samoset volunteer firefighter. “Back then it was the opposite of Lakewood Ranch; we had lots of fires,” Whitehurst recalls. 

He took a paying job as an electrician’s helper, while continuing to volunteer. Whitehurst moved over to the Braden River Fire Department — the predecessor to his current agency — which was in a pole barn with a tin roof on State Road 64 (it’s now a Starbucks). “Just a bunch of farm boys,” Whitehurst recalls, “and here I come in from Samoset with a year of experience as a responding firefighter and a couple of classes, and I’m like gold.”

Move up the ladder

He was a lieutenant at age 19, a captain by 24. “We had volunteers in their 40s, and I was always taught to honor my elders, so being the boss, if you will, was something I had to learn how to deal with,” Whitehurst recalls. He turned out to be a quick study, and soon earned a reputation for his dictatorial ways. “I was maybe a little heartless back then,” he acknowledges. “I’ve learned to be more compassionate.”

Whitehurst married the first of three wives at age 20, had a daughter in 1985, and lived in Manatee Palms. He had his heart set on becoming a full-time, paid firefighter but needed to go to a fire academy, so he sought employment at a department that would underwrite him. The Sarasota County Fire Department hired him in 1987. He did not stay long.

In 1983, the renamed Braden River Fire Control and Rescue District hired Henry Sheffield as its first paid fire chief. He and Whitehurst developed a mentor/mentee relationship, so in 1988, when it came time to hire two full-time firefighters to work days, Whitehurst was one of them. His salary jumped from $12,500 per year in Sarasota to $18,000 as a Braden River captain. He continued to work as an after-hours volunteer.

Whitehurst steadily moved up the ranks, making deputy chief of operations (“the firefighting side of it”) in 1992. The department got its current name in 2005. He says he was offered the job as chief when Sheffield retired in 2007, but turned it down because “now I’m a single parent of two kids (the other, a son) and I knew that I could not do what I needed to do to be chief.”

Whitehurst served as fire marshal for five years, then handled the business and HR side. He was appointed chief in January 2017. During his tenure in the upper ranks, the district has grown like a wildfire, generated largely by the development of Lakewood Ranch. Whitehurst — who lives in Lakewood Ranch’s Central Park neighborhood with his wife of 15 years, Carol Ann — figures he’s hired around 80 people since he’s been chief, some as replacements but most of them new positions.

The decision to retire in two years was all his. “I’m actually a little old now,” he says. “You don’t see very many 60-year-olds in the fire service.”