LYNN – Lynn Fire Chief Edward F. Higgins Jr. said Monday he plans to retire in January and head for warmer climates after 32 years on the job.Higgins, who turned 59 in October, was named fire chief five years ago. “The time has come for me to leave, while I’m still relatively young and healthy,” he said.The chief and his wife, Deborah, have purchased a home in Punta Gorda, Fla., which coincidentally is the community where former Lynn Fire Chief Curtis Numberg relocated after his retirement.”I’m tired of being cold. I had enough of being colder than you can imagine while fighting fires,” he said.Upon Higgins’ departure, Deputy Fire Chief James Carritte will become acting chief until Mayor Edward J. Clancy Jr. selects a permanent replacement.Higgins joined the department in 1976. “In those days, you fought fires even while you were still in training, simply because there were so many fires. They put you on a truck, but you had a strip of green tape on the front of your helmet,” he said. “The shield was a black shield with no company logo. The green tape indicated to everybody else that you were a rookie and didn’t know what you were doing.”Rookies were allowed to assist with pulling down ceilings and other tasks, known collectively as overhauling, but not actually fight fires, he said.Looking back on his career, Higgins recalled a few incidents that still stand out in his memory. “One in particular involved a fire on Light Street. I was a lieutenant at the time. The fire had blown out the windows and I ended up crawling into one. I found a baby, about 16 months old, in a crib, badly burned, but alive.”Nearly a dozen years later, Higgins had been promoted to district chief and was having lunch at the firehouse on Hollingsworth Street when three boys entered. “They were about 10-12 years old and asked if they could look at the trucks. Of course, we said, telling them not to touch anything. A few minutes later I went to check on what they were doing. One of them had bad scars on his face and arms, and I just knew right there it was him,” said Higgins. “I looked at him and said, ‘You’re Shane Johnson, aren’t you?’ It was just so weird that I knew. There aren’t many times when you get to see the effects of your work down the road.”A lot has changed in Fire Service since Higgins was a newbie. “Even over the past five years, the workload for chiefs has become more administrative,” he said. “There are a lot more requirements and red tape on us from the federal and state government, all sorts of anti-terrorist stuff, incident command training, and more planning – plans for this agency and plans for that organization. We end up dong the same work over and over because these groups don’t talk to each other.”Perhaps the biggest difference is the absence of the department chief at fire scenes. “In the old days, Chief (Joseph) Scanlon was right beside us fighting fires. Now, I don’t go until the third alarm. The job is just too busy,” he said.Jan. 5 is Higgins’ last day as chief.”Who replaces me depends on what the mayor wants to do. If the job stays in Civil Service, you can call for a chiefs’ test, and the mayor can decide what kind of test he wants. In the past, it was just a test. Now you can have a partial test and a partial assessment center. That’s becoming more common as lots of places get out of Civil Service completely,” he said. “There’s just too much that a chief has to know and the results of tests don’t always indicate if you can do accounting or handle labor relations.”The assessment option often translates to hiring private management company experts who, over one or two days, interact with the job candidates by role playing, report writing, conducting mock interviews and doing case studies.”Basically they want to get an idea how you handle specific situations,” Higgins said.Asked whether it’s likely the Lynn Fire Department will implement random drug testing following the deaths of two Boston firefighters whose autopsies show