Emporia’s firefighters just want their space.
On Wednesday, the Emporia Fire Department will ask the city commissioners to study the crowding at Fire Stations 1 and 2.
The commission meeting will begin at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday at the city conference room, 521 Market St.
Right now, Fire Chief Jack Taylor said, there are too many people and too much equipment in too little space.
“They’re cramped spaces,” Taylor said. “The way we have to park our vehicles, there are times when we have to move a truck out of the station to get to the vehicle we need out. That can create a little delay in the response time, depending on where the call is.”
If undertaken, the study would look at the fire department’s needs both now and 25 years in the future. It would be the first such study ever conducted for the department, Taylor said.
Fire Station No. 1 on East Fifth Avenue houses nine firefighters, eight fire trucks and the hazardous materials trailer, while Fire Station No. 2 on Industrial Road holds another six firefighters, six fire trucks and the rescue boat. The stations also have four ambulances between them.
“We’ve recently added that additional ambulance, so now we run four instead of three,” Taylor said. “We were already a little bit crowded and now we’re even more crowded.”
That also affects the type of equipment that the fire department can order.
“We have to be careful on the size of the trucks and the size of the bays available for them,” Taylor said. “The next truck we want to put in our fleet would be another ladder truck, similar to what we have at Station No. 2. And based on the space available at Station No. 1, there’s not room for it.”
It’s not the first time the issue has come up. During city budget discussions earlier this year, firefighters asked for some help with stations that were not just crowded, but in the case of Station No. 2 actively falling apart. That station has a heating and cooling system that was installed in 1978, a roof that has had to be patched every year, lots of floor and wall cracks and even a wall that has shifted several inches.
“It’s like a house,” Commissioner Ray Toso said during the discussions last summer. “You have to perform maintenance every now and then. You can’t let it deteriorate.”