For three years, Columbia City Council member Howard Duvall has wanted to replace the fire station near Olympia.
“It is outdated and in bad need of repair and in a bad location,” Duvall said.
Fire Station 2, on Ferguson Street between the Olympia community and Assembly Street, houses the engine of the same number and an all-terrain vehicle. The lack of space and trucks — as well as the railroad tracks surrounding the station in a growing part of the city — has sounded an alarm for Duvall and long-time Olympia resident Viola Hendley, who is also a community advocate for the Columbia Fire Department.
“It’s a Medusa,” Hendley said of the issues stemming from the dated and ill-located fire station. “Getting the cogs of government to move has been extremely frustrating. ... My primary focus now is to get a station built so those firefighters can have a decent place to lay their heads and adequate apparatus and personnel to cover their area.”
The area Station 2 serves includes the Vista section of Gervais Street and snakes east to Hollywood-Rosehill before cutting back over to Shop and Bluff roads a few miles behind Williams-Brice Stadium. All of Olympia and much of the south side of USC’s campus are served by Station 2, including Thomas Cooper Library.
Many of the student housing developments in which thousands of students live are situated in station 2’s area of service. The station serves Olympia and Granby Mills, YOUnion, Empire and other student housing complexes.
Those buildings are more than three stories high, and Station 2 doesn’t have a ladder truck. The closest station with a ladder is Number 9, located on Devine Street, which means its firefighters must travel through Five Points to get to any of the student complexes, a route that Hendley believes would cause delays.
What would definitely cause severe delays are trains. Leaving the station, the engine would travel less than a half mile in either direction on Assembly Street, the main thoroughfare in the area, before hitting tracks where trains are often stopped. If the fire engine were to try to take another road, the firefighters could still be cut off from almost all of its service area aside from Olympia because of the length and direction of those tracks on Assembly.
If a call required a ladder or if trains blocked Engine 2, another station further away would respond, according to Mike DeSumma, a spokesperson for the Columbia Fire Department. As standard practice, several stations respond to all fire calls. Still, the train tracks are a concern, DeSumma said.
From 2014 to 2018, Station 2 responded to about 1,500 to 1,700 calls per year. That’s about the average number of responses for a station, according to the fire department.
Expanding Station 2 and upgrading its equipment is “definitely something on our radar.”
“It is our desire to replace that stations as a long-term goal,” DeSumma said, calling the issues facing number 2 “something we should address...”
One solution proposed by Duvall is building a new firehouse at the site of Capital City Stadium, a 92-year-old baseball field on Assembly Street slated for demolition. The stadium and land is owned by the city.
Setting aside three acres of the property would save the city about $3 million from purchasing land for a fire station, according to Duvall. The location would also grant the engine better access to Assembly Street and allow space for the three bay station that the fire department would like to build, providing room for a ladder or other uses, DeSumma said.
Council is looking for ways to fund the project, according to Duvall.
While a firehouse on the Capital City Stadium site could alleviate the space and equipment issues, the new station would still be surrounded by railroads.
Hendley understands the complicated and expensive task of moving railroads and getting a new station built, but “we can’t wait,” she said.
“If we have a plan together in two years, how long will it take to come to fruition?” she said. “It’s going to take one of these high rises to burn to get someone’s attention. And that just can’t happen.”
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