Hillsborough County plans for better access to residents.
On July 29, Hillsborough County Fire Rescue held a community meeting at Bethany Baptist Church in Plant City to discuss construction plans for a new fire station designed to replace two aged stations.
During the meeting, Fire Rescue representatives discussed the reasons for the change, their plan, showed a map of current and future coverage of unincorporated Plant City, and obtained feedback from residents. “Building the station was dependent on the response from the community,” Rob Herrin, Public Safety Information Chief, Hillsborough County Fire Rescue, said. “We didn’t have any contention to it. We have secured a contract to purchase the land.” The process of accepting bids and construction will take, at minimum, two years.
The address of the 5.9-acre parcel of land is 2606 W. Sam Allen Rd. The new fire station will replace Number 26 – Cork/Knights, which is located at 5302 Thonotosassa Rd. and Number 30 – Midway, which sits at 2526 Charlie Taylor Rd. Cork/Knights opened in 1981, and Midway opened in 1982.
One reason for the new station is to improve county Fire Rescue access to residents in unincorporated areas. Since the Midway firehouse opened in 1981, the City of Plant City has annexed land on three sides of it, including the 1,008-acre, 1,940-house Farm at Varrea development. “Midway is mostly surrounded by the municipality of Plant City,” Herrin said. “There is not a lot of unincorporated Hillsborough County around it, and Plant City has their own priorities and responses.” Response time is crucial, but Station 30 trucks actually have to drive through incorporated Plant City to get to many calls in unincorporated Hillsborough County.
The new station will also upgrade capacity. Each of the current stations has two vehicle bays. The new station will have three or four bays, each deep enough to accommodate two vehicles back-to-back. These deep bays will allow the new station to add vehicles as future needs increase. Also, the living quarters of the current stations are not large enough to add staff. The new station will be “scalable, so we can grow into it,” Herrin said.
The fire station will have an updated design to mesh with new equipment and vehicles. The station will also provide health protection for firefighters. It will have decontamination suites with specialized equipment and showers to allow firefighters and EMTs to clean themselves and their equipment before going back into the station. “The big thing for us is when we are in structure fires, inevitably we come back to the station with carcinogens on our person, even when we take our gear off, it is still on us, and we want to be able to shower before we come into, essentially, our house,” Herrin said. “We live there for 24 hours. So we don’t want to bring that stuff in there. Firefighters are at a higher risk of a lot of different cancers. If we can help reduce that by just putting in a shower they can use before they bring carcinogens in, then we are going to do that.”
The fire station also would have single-bed sleeping quarters to reduce the spread among firefighters of colds, flu, and other airborne illnesses, to keep them healthy and staffing levels full.
Another feature of the new station will be modern dispatch alerting technology to improve response times through digital data displays, countdown timers, and mobile applications in the trucks. The alerting technology uses gently ramped alert tones and specialized lighting in the station to alert responders of an emergency. Alerts will start out with red light and ramp up to brighter colors. “In our old system, lights came on, and it was abruptly loud,” Herrin said. “You go from a sleeping heart rate of 60 to 70, to a rate of north of 100 in a matter of seconds. Studies have led to this improvement in how we are alerted to these calls.” The point of this progression is to reduce cardiac stress to lower the incidence of heart disease which is abnormally high in firefighters.
The county is in the process of taking construction bids, so the completion of the new station is still at least two years away. Until that time, Station 26 and Station 30 will continue to serve residents in unincorporated Plant City.
“By moving west of Plant City proper, we are going to be able to access more of unincorporated Hillsborough County,” Herrin concluded. “We will still be able to run into those small pockets that are surrounded by the City of Plant City from this location. We’re pretty excited about it. It’s going to better serve the citizens of unincorporated Hillsborough County around Plant City.”
