Nearly two years after purchasing a couple of properties in Salmon Creek, Clark County Fire District 6 is getting ready to break ground on a new, larger station.
Fire officials held a ceremony Thursday morning to kick off construction of the new station, which will be located at 1119 N.E. 136th St. Construction will begin sometime after Labor Day and is expected to finish in December 2019.
The site is just feet away from the existing Station 63 at 1200 N.E. 134th St. Station 63, which was built in the 1970s, is about 6,000 square feet. In comparison, the new two-story station will be more than 17,000 square feet and will be able to withstand a 9.0 earthquake.
At the start of the ceremony, fire officials spoke about the new station’s facilities, as well as its importance to the community.
“Our needs have changed, and our deployment is only getting more and more demanding so we need to meet those demands going into the future,” Fire Commissioner Casey Collins said. “We need to train, educate and keep up on all of our equipment to provide the best service available to our citizens that’s expected, and that’s why they continue to support us.”
Population growth in the communities that Station 63 serves — Salmon Creek, Mount Vista and the Clark County Fairgrounds — is a driving factor behind the upgrade.
The current Station 63 is the busiest and oldest of the fire district’s three stations; the district also shares a station at the Public Safety Complex. From 2006 to 2016, calls for service to Station 63 increased by 35 percent. In comparison, calls for service across the fire district increased by 31 percent.
“I’d anticipate we’re going to have some pretty significant growth for years,” Fire Chief Jerry Green said at Thursday’s ceremony.
Whereas the current Station 63 can only house one emergency response crew, the new station will be able to house two crews and is expected to support the fire district’s growth for the next 50 years.
“That’s always a best guesstimate — it’s hard to know exactly what we’re doing,” Assistant Chief Kristan Maurer said. “But we look at the trending of the community and that’s how we anticipate the growth.”
Maurer said that the new station will have a training facility — the first in the fire district — with two training captains and a classroom. It will also have a tower, an unfurnished steel building in which fire personnel can undergo live fire training.
“(The tower) is designed to have specific rooms where the firefighters can burn in and extinguish a real fire,” Maurer explained. “Right now, in order to do that, we either have to acquire structures, or we have to send them to outside training. This will allow us to do it all in-house.”
