WA Fire Department's 2nd New Station Home to New Aerial

Fully staffed and operational as of Monday, Cowlitz 2 Fire & Rescue’s new Lexington station will also be home for the agency’s new ladder truck.

The Lexington station is designed similarly to its sibling station in the Baker’s Corner neighborhood of West Longview, which itself came online only last month. Both stations are staffed with a combination of full-time and volunteer firefighters.

The coronavirus pandemic has scuttled the agency’s plans to hold open houses at both new stations for now. Instead, they’ll be showing virtual tours of the locations next week over Facebook Live. The Baker’s Corner station will be toured Monday at 2 p.m. and the Lexington Station will be toured Wednesday at the same time.

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The Lexington station has three bays for trucks compared to Baker’s Corner’s two bays. It will respond to calls from Ostrander to East Columbia Heights and up and down the I-5 corridor. And it will save an average of five to eight minutes on calls normally served by the downtown Kelso station, Cowlitz 2 Battalion Chief Jason Sanders said.

Sanders said call times across Cowlitz 2’s coverage area (which includes the City of Kelso and the unincorporated area around Longview and Kelso) should decrease now that the two new stations are staffed. But call times to the Columbia Heights area will increase somewhat, Sanders acknowledged, since responders quartered there are now being staffed at the new stations.

Voters in 2016 approved an $11 million, 20-year bond to replace both Baker’s Corner and Lexington’s aging predecessors. The Baker’s Corner station cost about $3.2 million and the Lexington station came out to about $2.9 million, Deputy Fire Marshall Jeremy Huff said.

Savings in the bidding process allowed engineers at the Lexington station to deal with unexpected snags during construction and add minor improvements like wood ceilings, Huff said.

Those savings have also helped the agency fund other equipment, such as covering the entire cost of the new ladder truck.

Cowlitz 2 purchased that truck in May of last year for $600,000 from a Georgia fire department which built it in 2014. It’s the agency’s first true ladder truck, although they previously operated a type of hybrid ladder- engine known as a “TeleSqurt” in the 1990s and 2000s.

The new truck arrived here in October, but until the new Baker’s Corner and Lexington stations were finished, the agency simply didn’t have a bay tall enough to hold it.

“It’s huge,” Battalion Chief Joe Tone said, both of the ladder truck and its value to the community. “Going without it has been a challenge.”

The agency has relied on its mutual aid agreements with Longview and other fire departments when a ladder truck is needed, but Kelso and the unincorporated county communities are growing and adding multi-story buildings, like the planned three-story Lexington Elementary School. So the timing was right, Tone said.

The truck can reach up to 105 feet from the ground when the ladder is fully extended.

Even for a veteran firefighter like Tone, who has experience rappelling from ladder trucks, “your heart rate goes up, no matter how many times you’ve done it.”

“Some are comfortable (climbing the ladder). Some get through it. And some aren’t,” Sanders said. “It’s about knowing your capabilities.”

The ladder truck can carry 500 gallons of water and is equipped to handle medical calls, too. While its primary purpose is responding to multi-story fires, it’s important that the agency’s equipment be flexible for a variety of calls, Tone said.

“It’s set up to do it all,” Tone said. “We’re consolidating more things into one vehicle to handle all the work.”

Firefighters have started training with the truck, Sanders said, and hope to be using it on calls by May. Driving the 42-foot-long, 68,000 pound truck is a skill of its own.

“You’re operating a crane with people on it,” Tone said. “It has a ton of power, and wrong movements will damage or crush things. ... It takes every ounce of room you’ve got in this community to get it around town.”

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