Marshal Marshall is retiring Friday. State Fire Marshal Roy Marshall has been Iowa’s chief fire investigator for 11 years and has spent nearly four decades working in the public safety field.Marshall started his career as a radio dispatcher for the Iowa State Patrol when he was still a teenager. He later joined the volunteer fire department in Lewis and was hired in the Iowa Fire Marshal’s Office in 1975. After 25 years of sniffing out fires, Marshall says he’s worked on many hundreds of investigations.The 59-year-old Cass County native plans to travel and perhaps do consulting work after some time off. Assistant Fire Marshal George Howe will be named acting Fire Marshal on Saturday. Marshall looks back on some achievements over his years as state Fire Marshal.Marshall says those aren’t personal accomplishments, but represent a lot of work by a lot of people during his tenure as Fire Marshal. The decade of the 1990s saw the fewest fire deaths in Iowa than in any other decade during the century. The three years that saw the lowest fire deaths during the century were also during the 1990s.
