‘Career fire’: North Carolina fire chief recounts what happened during January fertilizer plant fire

VIDEO: Winston-Salem Fire Chief Trey Mayo calls the Weaver Fertilizer Plant fire his “career fire.”

Just about everyone can point to that one event: the most stressful, challenging, sleep-preventing, on-the-job happening unlike any other.

For me, it was the interview I did with the husband of Sandy Bradshaw about a week after Sept. 11, 2001. Sandy was a flight attendant on United Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania.

For Mayo, it was the fertilizer plant fire on Jan. 31, 2022.

Make no mistake, Mayo has worked big fires before.

He’s a third-generation firefighter who began his career in his hometown of Plymouth, North Carolina in the late 1980s. He’d go on to spend 11 years and rise to the rank of captain in the Raleigh Fire Department. He’d serve as deputy chief in Carrboro and chief in Rocky Mount before arriving in Winston-Salem in early 2015.

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