By Ken Stephens
Hutchinson News – July 27, 2014
When Fire Stations No. 3 and 5 were built in 1975, Chief Kim Forbes said, no one was thinking that one day the Hutchinson Fire Department would merge with Fire District No. 2, taking in miles of unincorporated territory around the city. Nor was anyone thinking about developments butting up against the wild lands to the north and east, he said.
No one foresaw the need to position specialized trucks for fighting brush fires around the city, or the need to have tenders and trailers capable of delivering thousands of gallons of water to areas where there weren’t any fire hydrants.
But now Forbes and his staff are thinking about where best to position new and larger fire stations capable of housing the additional fire trucks that will be needed to meet the city’s needs for the next 30 to 50 years.
So, city leaders balked this past week at the idea of spending $220,000 to repair the roof and a bulging wall at Fire Station No. 5, which they were told was already an inadequate 39-year-old station, perhaps less than ideally located to serve the city’s future needs.
Instead, they’re putting $800,000 in the capital improvement plan to build a modern station, larger and better positioned.
Over the next three or four months, Forbes told the City Council on Tuesday, his staff will study possible locations for a new station and report back to the council by December.
The Fire Department will analyze a number of types of data, including the number of types of calls they are answering. In 2013, Deputy Chief Doug Hanen said, they rolled on 4,400 calls. Of those, 101 were structure fires. The others were grass fires, miscellaneous fires, medical calls and rescues. The number of calls, Forbes said, grows by 100 to 200 a year.
Because the city’s population is aging (there are about 11,000 people 65 and older now and that’s expected to grow to more than 15,000 by 2030), Forbes expects that the number of medical calls will increase.
The study also will examine the city’s growth pattern – commercial and residential.
Nearly 40 years ago, when Stations No. 3 and 5 were built, there were a handful of businesses along 11th, 17th and 30th Avenues, Forbes said. Now both sides of those streets are lined with businesses.
Forbes said there has been tremendous change at 17th and Lorraine and more development near 17th and Waldron, including health care facilities. There are two new hotels near 11th and K-61, a new school that will open this fall near 43rd and Severance and plans for at least 60 new homes near the school. The city also recently platted three other new subdivisions with plans for 108 single-family hopes and eight duplexes along the city’s northern tier. Forbes also foresees more commercial development near the new Dillon’s marketplace at 30th and Waldron.
The community, he said, keeps growing to the north and northeast, where it also is butting up against what he said is the largest wild land/urban interface in the state – miles of brush, cedar trees and plum thickets.
“You don’t have to go far out of the city and you hit the wild land interface,” Forbes said. “… Several times we’ve had a fire travel a mile in 15 to 17 minutes. It can be a half mile long and a mile to a mile and a half wide.”
When the wind drives fires that fast, he said, homes are immediately threatened. In those cases, the Fire Department deploys a variety of units — brush trucks to get off the road to fight the wild fire, tenders to deliver water and traditional ladder trucks to protect houses under threat.
“Maybe we need to move some stations a little east and north,” Forbes said. “They could be shifted and still meet today’s needs but get closer to what tomorrow’s emergencies will look like.”
Hanen said that ideally each station should have one or two brush units, in addition to its traditional fire trucks. But some of the stations don’t have room for additional units.
Fire Station No. 3 has room for one apparatus; No. 5 has room for two; No. 2 has room for three; No. 6 has room for four; No. 1 has room for five, and No. 4 has room for eight.
“A good rule of thumb for us going forward may be to look at a minimum of six bays,” Hanen said.
That’s the number of bays in Station No. 7, which opened in 2012 at 3414 E. 30th Ave. Unlike Stations 1 and 2, newer stations have front and rear garage doors so that fire trucks don’t have to be backed in off the streets, Hanen said.
Fire Station No. 6 also has separate sleeping quarters, locker rooms and bathrooms for male and female firefighters.
Growth to the north and the wild land interface aren’t Forbes’ only concerns. He’s also concerned about the aging and deteriorating housing in the southern half of the city, especially vacant and abandoned houses.
Older structures, Forbes said, are more vulnerable to fires because the electrical wiring may no longer be adequate. Furnaces that haven’t been serviced and checked for safety on a regular basis also cause fires. Sometimes poor or elderly people may not be able to afford repairing or replacing a furnace so they rely on space heaters, which can start fires when knocked over or placed too close to furniture or drapes or other combustible material, Forbes said.
And when older houses burn, often they burn faster if they haven’t been maintained well and siding is cracked and weathered.
“If there are a lot of vacant homes, especially in the winter you have people trying to get out of the cold,” he said. “And if there are no utilities in the house, they are starting fires to get warm or cook. Those houses are in poor condition. If you have a fire in one abandoned house, the houses on either side of it also are being threatened. You have to stop it quickly so you don’t have a fire in two houses.”
Fire Stations No. 3 and 5 were built to the same design in 1975. At both stations, the roofs are sagging and leaking because they weren’t designed with adequate roof support. There’s no immediate danger that the roofs will collapse, although Forbes is concerned enough that he’ll consider temporarily pulling his crews and equipment out if a foot of heavy, wet snow piles up on the roof.
But even if the structures were sound, he said, it’s time to reevaluate the location of the stations.
“Every 30 to 50 years you should analyze whether the stations are still in the best location to serve the community,” he said.
The city’s newest fire station, No. 7, opened in 2012 at a cost of about $750,000. It would have been more, but Westar Energy donated land on 30th Avenue south of its power plant.
In choosing a site for a new station, the Fire Department will look at land the city already owns. It may try to swap some city-owned land for privately owned land in a better location for a fire station. Another possibility is that if an aging station is in what will still be a good location for the next 30 to 50 years, they could raze that station, temporarily relocate firefighters and equipment to another station and build a larger, modern station on the same site.
“There may two or three that need to be relocated,” Forbes said. “We’ll take a look at it all. It could be (replacing No.) 3 and 5 first or 2 and 5. If there’s an opportunity to combine two stations, we’ll see.”
“We want to get them in the best location we can and the size you need. We may not have all the equipment for them today, but it’s coming and we want to have a place to put it.”
Gwen Romine, KSFFA Webmaster
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