City and fire officials broke ground for Vancouver’s two new fire stations Monday during a dedication ceremony.
“This is a big day,” Vancouver Fire Department Deputy Chief Doug Koellermeier said at the site where the new Station 2 will be built. “With these new stations, we’ll be able to continue to provide a high-quality, efficient and effective public service. … It’s an honor and our obligation to ensure that the residents of our community receive safe and active levels of response from their fire department.”
The two buildings will cost about $10.2 million, including design, construction and property costs. The city is paying for the new stations through surplus property sales and a longer-term funding plan that started in 2013. The two stations will be nearly identical.
Station 1 will be rebuilt in Uptown Village at 2607 Main St., on the corner of West Fourth Plain Boulevard and Main Street. The new Station 2 will sit south of Fourth Plain Boulevard, at 2106 Norris Road.
Moving the two stations will help improve response times to the more dense parts of the city, which have greater call volumes, Koellermeier said.
The department doesn’t have a precise measure of how the moves will affect response times, Koellermeier said, but it does expect that busier parts of town will see an improvement.
“Outlying areas where they’re moving away from, it will be slightly less, but those (have) considerably less call volume,” he said.
The stations are expected to be finished by August 2017. When they’ll be completely up and running is harder to say, Koellermeier said.
Once the stations are finished, firefighters will have to test out alarms, connections to the county 911 system and other usability concerns.
“It could be a couple of days; it could be a couple of weeks,” he said. “It’s a little bit more complicated than just driving the trucks over.”
Northwest design and engineering firm Mackenzie, along with Interface Engineering, designed the stations, each to include three drive-through vehicle bays, energy-efficient construction, work rooms, a living space with dorm rooms, a kitchen, day room, gym and an area for police to stop in to write reports. Corp Inc. Construction of Salem, Ore., will build the stations.
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Correction: The article originally misstated Mackenzie’s company name.
