Vigil honors Vancouver’s Fire Station 6

They’ve known it was coming since July. But that didn’t help to dull the anguish of the 30 people gathered to mourn the closure of Vancouver Fire Station 6 Thursday night.

Today is the last day the station will be open, the victim of drastic city budget cuts.

They lit candles and shivered in the cold to pay their respects to what some felt was the loss of a neighborhood friend.

“They’re part of our hearts and our community,” said Mary Elkin, an Image neighborhood resident who started Friends of Fire Station 6 to lobby the city council to keep its doors open. “The loss of this fire station will be felt by everyone. We will not give up. Our community needs this firehouse.”

She called on those in attendance, occasionally interrupted by honks from the busy nearby street, to keep fighting and petitioning the city council to find the money.

Retiring Fire Chief Don Bivins, whose last day on the job is also today, had to cut $1.8 million from his budget. He has said closing the Burton station, at 3216 N.E. 112th Ave., was the “least worst” choice, because it is centrally located and the neighborhood can be covered by multiple surrounding stations.

Truck 6, which was housed in the station, will no longer be in service.

The city shuttered its two remaining medical rescue units last year because of the budget. Overall, 18 uniformed firefighter positions were cut through retirement and attrition, along with numerous support jobs and sworn investigators in the fire marshal’s division. The area around Fire Station 6 now becomes a “doughnut hole” that will add at least two minutes to the department’s overall response time of 8.5 minutes.

Firefighter Union President Mark Johnston said he’s most worried about the elderly, sick and poor who will “be impacted the most.”

“It’s going to be strange when New Year’s Day comes and no one’s here,” he said. “It’s a bitter, bitter, bitter thing for us.”

Standing on the frost-covered lawn, Capt. Carl Murray said it’s a shame to lose the station that he worked in for two years.

“I really enjoyed this station,” he said. “It’s a converted old house. It’s not the best station to be in, but it’s our station.”

Hope for the station is not entirely lost: The city applied for a Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response, or SAFER, grant that would provide enough money to reopen the station and restaff the ladder truck. The grant would pay for 13 firefighters for two years, and could get Station 6 back online by June. Vancouver officials are expecting to be told if it got the grant in January.

Former Vancouver City Councilor Pat Jollota shielded a candle against the wind to commemorate the station, which opened in 1987. She said she would have joined Councilor Bart Hansen in voting against the city’s biennial budget, which passed 6-1 in September. Others on the council felt that the drastic cuts to other departments, like transportation and parks, that would have been necessary to keep the fire station open were not acceptable.

“This could have been avoided,” she said. “If the council had set it as a policy — fire stations will not be closed, public safety would not be compromised — staff would have had to find a way. We needed a couple more stations, not to be closing them down.”

Andrea Damewood: 360-735-4542 or andrea.damewood@columbian.com.