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Plans for City's New Fire Station Are Scaled Back

Posted on: Thursday, 17 November 2005, 18:00 CST

By TONY DE PAUL Journal Staff Writer

WARWICK - Three years ago, when voters authorized building a new fire headquarters, department officials hoped there would be enough money to include a training center.

They wanted to keep more firefighters available to respond to emergencies instead of training them 22 miles away, at the Union Fire District Training Facility, in South Kingstown.

That won't be possible, Fire Chief Jack Chartier told the City Council on Monday, when it awarded a $4.7-million contract for the project to H.V. Collins Co., of Providence.

The water table at the building site -- on Veterans Memorial Drive in Apponaug, next to the Police Department -- is so high that designers had to eliminate the basement, Chartier said. That put above-ground space at a premium, and the spaces once earmarked for training were soon dedicated to other uses, among them, a citywide "emergency operations center."

Also, the department had to scale back the design from five equipment bays to four. The fifth bay and the training facilities would have put the project as much as $1.5 million over budget, Chartier said yesterday.

"It came down to what we have to have versus what we would like to have," he said.

Officials say the building will still be impressive and a great improvement over the aging Station 1 at the City Hall Annex.

Council members haggled for months over where to build the new headquarters, until the city administration chose land it already owns in Apponaug. The project includes building a new access road to the Police Department, one closer to the property line with a Mobil station, and building the fire headquarters west of the access road.

Assistant Fire Chief Kevin Sullivan said yesterday it was important to get a contract awarded because construction costs are increasing rapidly.

Everything in a project of this scale is a big-ticket item, Sullivan said: $500,000 in site work and underground utilities, $750,000 in brick masonry, $400,000 in electrical work, $400,000 in heating and ventilation.

Eliminating the basement saved $650,000, he said.

Eliminating the fifth bay saved $200,000.

The design still includes a clock tower, but the space within will be used for offices that would have been in the basement.

In the initial design, unveiled a year ago, the clock tower was hollow, allowing firefighters to train with ropes, rappelling into the basement from a height of 40 feet.

The early design also showed features that would have enabled firefighters to train with hoses, spraying and recovering up to 3,000 gallons of water a minute.

It also included a maze that firefighters could fill with smoke, to enable them to train with the air packs they carry into burning buildings.

Losing those features to budget constraints is "unfortunate," Sullivan said, "but we're getting a new fire station and a new headquarters."

Building a training facility in Warwick has become "more of a long-range goal," he said.

Chartier said yesterday that beyond the budget constraints, using a working fire station as a training center emerged as a better idea on paper than in practice.

"We started to take a look at it from a common-sense perspective," he said, and saw potential problems "with a recruit class raising ladders and doing rope work on the front ramp of a functioning fire station while you've got the regular crew trying to get in and out of the building and respond to emergencies."

Mayor Scott Avedisian said yesterday the $4.7-million budget was firm, and there was no additional money to offset rising construction costs.

"We knew what we had to spend and we were determined to stay under that and not even think about going over," he said.

The voters authorized the project in 2002 as part of a $7.5- million bond issue for improvements to fire and police properties.

Source: Providence Journal

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