Deputy Chief Doug Koellermeier likened it to moving into a new house: You don’t know what problems will arise or what won’t work quite right until you start living in the space.
Among the most noticeable problems were the resounding echoes throughout the stations. But it wasn’t anything that several acoustic boards couldn’t solve. The kitchen also needed a few cabinets removed to make more working space for firefighters trying to cook and eat at the same time.
Capt. Tom Schell described his experience at Station 2 the same way.
“There’s lots of little things, little bugs, you don’t realize or expect until you start living here,” Schell said. “I think most of those were worked out.”
Architectural hiccups aside, Schell said the new stations are night and day as compared to the other eight in Vancouver’s Fire Department. Schell came from Station 3, which was built out of an old house.
He and others stationed at the new $15 million facilities have had to adjust to the new way of doing things. The sleeping quarters, for example, are now individual rooms. Schell said he misses the camaraderie of the dorm-style sleeping quarters.
“It’s easy to be isolated here,” he added.
Chief Joe Molina acknowledged that it’s an adjustment for those who grew up in the service with more traditional living quarters, but creating that separate space was necessary.
“We’ve created an inclusive workspace as well as a private space they can have,” Molina said. “Hopefully, they begin to realize that they’re still a team. There’s time to be a team but also time to let people be themselves.”
As the fire department begins planning the layout of its future Station 11, Molina said they’re considering making the living quarters even more private by relocating the single-stall restrooms that were new to Station 1 and 2 into the bedrooms making an en suite of sorts.
At the same time, Molina is hoping to add more square footage in future stations not only for living spaces but also in the apparatus bay.
“It may look like the apparatus space has tons of room, but if you look back at the old station, they thought those were good,” Koellermeier said of the previously tight working space. “Twenty years from now, we’ll be gone. What is that administration going to do with this station?”
Their job, as Koellermeier and Molina see it, is to lay a foundation for the future so the stations being built now can be used 50 years down the road and adapt as the industry continued to change.
“The last thing we want is some administration 20 years from now saying, ‘What were they thinking?’ ” Molina said.
In a sense, they’re trying to predict the future — or at least create spaces that can easily adapt to whatever the future may hold.
What’s worked
Rebuilding Station 1 and 2 wasn’t just to improve facilities for the firefighters who staff the facilities or to better plan for the future. Service levels were also suffering as a result of the old stations’ locations.
In the nine months since Station 1 and 2 opened, response times have improved. Not only that, but mapped “hot spots” with slow response times have decreased. In one area, the hot spot has almost disappeared.
The largest improvement is seen around Station 2. The hot spots are determined based on how many calls could be reached within the department’s goal of 7 minutes and 59 seconds. Before the station opened, late calls were in the highest range: between 45 and 83. With the station built and operational, the area only had between 13 and 24 calls with response times of more than 8 minutes.
“It’s good to see that we did improve not only around those two stations, but you can see you also improved the system response as a whole,” Molina said.
Station 3, for example, is more available to take calls farther east since it isn’t responding to calls in the Fourth Plain Corridor.
The remaining hot spot is right next to where Station 11 will locate at Northeast 117th Avenue and Padden Parkway. Molina said he’s pleased to see the data reflecting their plans.
“To me it’s the best way of showing the effect of these new stations,” he said.
With Station 11 completed sometime in 2020, Molina can move on to relocating Station 3 and renovating Station 5.
“Then I think we’ll be pretty well set up in terms of a base fire station model,” he said.
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